High Energy Theory Seminar

There is growing evidence that the central charges a and c count degrees of freedom of four-dimensional conformal field theories. I will present further support for this connection in a supersymmetric context by demonstrating that they may be obtained from the superconformal index that encodes the BPS spectrum of the theory. While the expressions for the central charges were obtained holographically, I will argue that they remain valid away from the large-N limit. Hence the asymptotic behavior of the index in terms of a and c is expected to have a universal component, along with possible non-universal terms.