Surface Operators

Abstract

This is the seventh article in the collection of reviews "Exact results on N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories", ed. J.Teschner. It discusses an interesting class of observables localised on surfaces that attracts steadily growing attention. In the correspondence to conformal field theory some of these observables get related to a class of fields in two dimensions called degenerate fields. These fields satisfy differential equations that can be used to extract a lot of information on the correlation functions. Understanding the origin of these differential equations within gauge theory may help explaining the AGT-correspondence itself.