Boundary conditions changing operators in non-conformal theories

Abstract

Boundary conditions changing operators have played an important role in conformal field theory. Here, we study their equivalent in the case where a mass scale is introduced, in an integrable way, either in the bulk or at the boundary. More precisely, we propose an axiomatic approach to determine the general scalar products b 〈 θ 1, … , θ m ‖ θ 1′, … , θ n ′〉 a , between asymptotic states in the Hilbert spaces with a and b boundary conditions respectively, and compute these scalar products explicitly in the case of the Ising and sinh-Gordon models with a mass and a boundary interaction. These quantities can be used to study statistical systems with inhomogeneous boundary conditions, and, more interestingly maybe, dynamical problems in quantum impurity problems. As an example, we obtain a series of new exact results for the transition probability in the double-well problem of dissipative quantum mechanics.