Bootstrapping boundaries and branes

About

I will describe recent work with Dalimil Mazac and Yifan Wang initiating the systematic bootstrap study of conformal boundary conditions in 2d CFTs by investigation of the bootstrap equation that arises from the open-closed consistency condition of the annulus partition function with identical boundaries. We find that this deceivingly simple bootstrap equation, when combined with unitarity, leads to surprisingly strong constraints on admissible boundary states. In particular, we derive universal bounds on the tension (boundary entropy) of stable boundary conditions, which provide a rigorous diagnostic for potential D-brane decays. We also find unique solutions to the bootstrap problem of stable branes in a number of rational CFTs. Along the way, we observe a curious connection between the annulus bootstrap and the sphere packing problem, which is a natural extension of previous work on the modular bootstrap. We also derive bounds on the boundary entropy at large central charge. These potentially have implications for end-of-the-world branes in pure gravity on AdS_3.