Domain Walls in CFT and Holography

Robbert Dijkgraaf (Amsterdam & IAS)

We will discuss how one consistently glues conformal field theories in two dimensions
separated by domain walls. We give a general procedure to classify such walls and we
compute in interesting examples the Casimir energy between a wall and anti-wall.
These domain walls appear in the holographic description of branes in AdS3, where
we compare the CFT computation with the supergravity results. Based on work with
C. Bachas, J. de Boer and H. Ooguri (hep-th/0111210).