Higher Structures on Boundary Conformal Manifolds: Higher Berry Phase and Boundary Conformal Field Theory

Abstract: We introduce the notion of higher Berry connection and curvature in the space of conformal boundary conditions in (1+1)d conformal field theories (CFT), related to each other by exactly marginal boundary deformations, forming a "boundary conformal manifold." Our definition builds upon previous works on tensor networks, such as matrix product states (MPS), where the triple inner product or multi-wavefunction overlap plays the key geometric role. On the one hand, our boundary conformal field theory (BCFT) formulation of higher Berry phase provides a new analytic tool to study families of invertible phases in condensed matter systems. On the other hand, it uncovers a new geometric structure on the moduli space of conformal boundary conditions, beyond the usual Riemannian structure defined through the Zamolodchikov metric. When the boundary conformal manifold has an interpretation as the position moduli space of a D-brane, our higher Berry connection coincides with the NS-NS $B$-field in string theory. The general definition does not require such an interpretation and is formulated purely field-theoretically, in terms of correlation functions of boundary-condition-changing (bcc) operators. We also explore a connection between higher Berry connections and functional Berry connections in the loop spaces of boundary conformal manifolds.