Conformal QED in AdS as a BCFT

Abstract

We study conformal Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) coupled to either $N_f$ massless fermions or $N_s$ conformally coupled scalars in Euclidean Anti-de Sitter (AdS$_d$) space for $d < 4$. Using the $ε$-expansion around $d=4$, we investigate the associated Boundary Conformal Field Theories (BCFTs) defined by imposing either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions on the gauge field. We compute the regularized AdS free energy at the interacting fixed point up to next-to-leading order and extract some of the boundary conformal data at one loop, including the anomalous dimensions of the lightest singlet scalar operators. For Dirichlet boundary conditions, extrapolation of our $ε$-expansion results indicate that one of these scalar operators, which is irrelevant near $d=4$, reaches marginality within the range $3 < d < 4$. This suggests that the Dirichlet boundary condition may not define a stable BCFT in $d=3$.