On Boundary State Screening via Solitons

Abstract

We present a coarse classification scheme for the boundary data of massive QFTs based on transitions of boundary states via soliton / kink profiles. Starting from the lattice of boundary states, we introduce the boundary screening group $\mathbb{B}$: the equivalence classes of boundary states which cannot be connected by such transitions. In string theory backgrounds which geometrically engineer an interacting QFT in the target space, $\mathbb{B}$ computes the worldsheet analog of the target space defect group $\mathbb{D}$. When $\mathbb{B}$ is non-zero, it provides a diagnostic for having a target space with non-normalizable modes. For interfaces between QFTs, similar considerations imply the existence of a non-trivial conserved charge associated with soliton absorption / transmission, which means that the interface cannot fully dissolve / disappear. Similar considerations hold for junctions of QFTs, which in the special case of string worldsheet CFTs translate to junctions of string theories. We illustrate these general considerations with a number of non-geometric 2D $\mathcal{N} = (2,2)$ Landau-Ginzburg models, as well as their natural lifts to 4D $\mathcal{N} = 1$ Wess-Zumino models.