Paper detail

Conformal defects in supergravity - backreacted Dirac delta sources

We construct numerically gravitational duals of theories deformed by localized Dirac delta sources for scalar operators both at zero and at finite temperature. We find that requiring that the backreacted geometry preserves the original scale invariance of the source uniquely determines the potential for the scalar field to be the one found in a certain Kaluza-Klein compactification of $11D$ supergravity. This result is obtained using an efficient perturbative expansion of the backreacted background at zero temperature and is confirmed by a direct numerical computation. Numerical solutions at finite temperatures are obtained and a detailed discussion of the numerical approach to the treatment of the Dirac delta sources is presented. The physics of defect configurations is illustrated with a calculation of entanglement entropy.