HEP group meeting.
Abstract: The admissible boundary conditions and defects of a given quantum field theory are fundamental pieces of information that characterise it. Although finding the space of admissible boundaries and defects is generally difficult, much progress can be made for highly symmetric systems that enjoy conformal symmetry and/or supersymmetry. In this talk I will discuss a certain class of 1/2-BPS superconformal interfaces in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory and closely related systems, which all contain fields that have divergences or poles at the location of the defect. By focusing on simple correlation functions in the presence of such defects, I will describe how characteristic data at finite N can be extracted using perturbation theory and (super-)conformal symmetry.