25–28 Aug 2025
Albano Building 2
Europe/Stockholm timezone

Non-invertible symmetries of Non-Linear Sigma Models

25 Aug 2025, 15:50
25m
Auditorium 5 (Albano Building 2)

Auditorium 5

Albano Building 2

Speaker

Guillermo Arias-Tamargo (Imperial College London)

Description

Global symmetries can be generalised to transformations generated by topological operators, including cases in which the topological operator does not have an inverse. A family of such topological operators are intimately related to dualities via the procedure of half-space gauging. In this work we discuss the construction of non-invertible defects based on T-duality in two dimensions, generalising the well-known case of the free compact boson to any Non-Linear Sigma Model with Wess-Zumino term which is T-dualisable. Our approach allows us to include target spaces without non-trivial 1-cycles, does not require the NLSM to be conformal, and when it is conformal it does not need to be rational; moreover, it highlights the microscopic origin of the topological terms that are responsible for the non-invertibility of the defect. An interesting class of examples are Wess-Zumino-Witten models, which are self-dual under a discrete gauging of a subgroup of the isometry symmetry and so host a topological defect line with Tambara-Yamagami fusion. Time permitting, I'll discuss the target space interpretation of these defects, and their fate in String Theory.

Presentation materials