Holographic defect CFTs with Dirichlet end-of-the-world branes

A bstract We construct a holographic model of defect conformal field theories (DCFTs) with defects of codimension greater than one. Our construction generalizes the AdS/BCFT model by anchoring the end-of-the-world brane on defects at the asymptotic AdS boundary and imposing Dirichlet boundary conditions for the metric on the brane. We compute the defect entropy and defect free energy and show that the defect $$ \mathcal{C} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>C</mml:mi> </mml:math> -function is always non-negative. We further study holographic defect-localized RG flows triggered by a localized scalar field on the brane and show that the defect $$ \mathcal{C} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>C</mml:mi> </mml:math> -theorem holds. We also verify that our model reproduces the expected forms of correlation functions in DCFTs.