Truncated Polyakov bootstrap for BCFTs: Neumann-Dirichlet flow and Ising special transition

Abstract

We extend the recently proposed truncated Polyakov bootstrap to boundary conformal field theories (BCFTs). The formalism uses the analytic functional framework to find approximate solutions of BCFT crossing. We show that a generic nonperturbative solution can be identified by relating it to a family of deformations around generalized free fields (GFF) with a fixed boundary condition. We show this by tracking the flow of BCFT data from GFF with Neumann boundary condition to that with Dirichlet. The same method is then used for the 3d Ising special transition, using the perturbative Wilson-Fisher description as the deformation to identify it. The BCFT data obtained are in remarkable agreement with existing lattice results where available, and are otherwise new.