The analysis reveals translation invariant defects can exist in conformal field theory, suggesting new pathways for studying topological defects.
The modern way to understand symmetries of a quantum field theory is via its topological defects in various dimensions. In this contribution to the proceedings we focus on line defects in 2d QFT and we point out that topological defects naturally embed into a larger class, namely translation invariant defects. The latter still allow for non-singular fusion and one obtains a monoidal category of translation invariant defects which contains that of topological defects as a full subcategory. We give a simple perturbative description of translation invariant defects in a perturbed conformal field theory via chiral threedimensional topological field theory. We show in the example the the Ising CFT and the Lee-Yang CFT that even if no topological defects survive the deformation, some translation invariant defects still do.
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Ambrosino et al. (2025) studied this question.
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