Central Charge

The c-number in the stress–energy tensor commutator that characterizes a conformal field theory and weights its anomaly.

Specifications & Metrics

A c-number term (commuting with every other operator) that appears in the commutator of two components of the stress–energy tensor.
Conformal field theory is characterized by a representation of the Virasoro algebra with central charge c.
For CFTs described by modular tensor categories, higher central charges are computed through Gauss sums.