Defect Approach to Giant Graviton Dynamics

Abstract: We develop a framework of zero dimensional defects for analyzing light-light-heavy-heavy (LLHH) correlators in conformal field theories. We specifically apply this formalism to correlators of giant gravitons in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills to probe the nontrivial physics beyond planarity. By combining this framework with bootstrap techniques, we compute all four-point functions at strong coupling involving two maximal giant gravitons and two supergravitons of arbitrary dimensions. We identify a partially broken, higher-dimensional hidden symmetry -- a defect extension of 10d hidden conformal symmetry -- present at both strong and weak coupling, which allows these correlators to be packaged into a single generating function. Furthermore, we perform a systematic OPE analysis of the strong-coupling correlators, extracting the complete spectrum of anomalous dimensions for the defect-channel double-particle operators. Finally, we argue that the defect perspective provides the natural nonperturbative description for any LLHH correlator by showing that four-point conformal blocks reduce to defect two-point blocks in the heavy limit.