Energy Momentum Tensor in Conformal Field Theories Near a Boundary

Abstract

The requirements of conformal invariance for the two point function of the energy momentum tensor in the neighbourhood of a plane boundary are investigated, restricting the conformal group to those transformations leaving the boundary invariant. It is shown that the general solution may contain an arbitrary function of a single conformally invariant variable $v$, except in dimension 2. The functional dependence on $v$ is determined for free scalar and fermion fields in arbitrary dimension $d$ and also to leading order in the $\vep$ expansion about $d=4$ for the non Gaussian fixed point in $ϕ^4$ theory. The two point correlation function of the energy momentum tensor and a scalar field is also shown to have a unique expression in terms of $v$ and the overall coefficient is determined by the operator product expansion. The energy momentum tensor on a general curved manifold is further discussed by considering variations of the metric. In the presence of a boundary this procedure naturally defines extra boundary operators. By considering diffeomorphisms these are related to components of the energy momentum tensor on the boundary. The implications of Weyl invariance in this framework are also derived.