We present a factorized decomposition of 4-point scalar conformal blocks near the lightcone, which applies to arbitrary intermediate spin and general spacetime dimensions. Then we discuss the systematic expansion in large intermediate spin and the resummations of the large-spin tails of Regge trajectories. The basic integrals for the Lorentzian inversion are given by Wilson functions.
In the study of conformal field theories, conformal blocks in the lightcone limit are fundamental to the analytic conformal bootstrap method. Here we consider the lightcone limit of 4-point functions of generic scalar primaries. Based on the nonperturbative pole structure in spin of Lorentzian inversion, we propose the natural basis functions for cross-channel conformal blocks. In this new basis, we find a closed-form expression for crossed conformal blocks in terms of the Kampé de Fériet function, which applies to intermediate operators of arbitrary spin in general dimensions. We derive the g…
We present new closed-form expressions for 4-point scalar conformal blocks in the s- and t-channel lightcone expansions. Our formulae apply to intermediate operators of arbitrary spin in general dimensions. For physical spin $\ell$, they are composed of at most $(\ell+1)$ Gaussian hypergeometric functions at each order.
We study the chiral limit of 2d QCD with a single quark flavor at finite $N_c$ using LCT. By modifying the LCT basis according to the quark mass in a manner motivated by 't Hooft's analysis, we are able to restore convergence for quark masses much smaller than the QCD strong coupling scale. For such small quark masses, the IR of the theory is expected to be well described by the Sine-Gordon model. We verify that LCT numerics are able to capture in detail the spectrum and correlation functions of the Sine-Gordon model. This opens up the possibility for studying deformations of various integrabl…
We analytically study the lightcone limit of the conformal bootstrap equations for 4-point functions containing global symmetry currents and the stress tensor in 3d CFTs. We show that the contribution of the stress tensor to the anomalous dimensions of large spin double-twist states is negative if and only if the conformal collider physics bounds are satisfied. In the context of AdS/CFT these results indicate a relation between the attractiveness of AdS gravity and positivity of the CFT energy flux. We also study the contribution of non-Abelian conserved currents to the anomalous dimensions of…
Heavy-heavy-light-light (HHLL) correlators of pairwise identical scalars in CFTs with a large central charge in any number of dimensions admit a double scaling limit where the ratio of the heavy conformal dimension to the central charge becomes large as the separation between the light operators becomes null. In this limit the stress tensor sector of a generic HHLL correlator receives contributions from the multi stress tensor operators with any number of stress tensors, as long as their twist is not increased by index contractions. We show how one can compute this leading twist stress tensor …
We use the method of Lightcone Conformal Truncation (LCT) to obtain form factors and spectral densities of local operators $\mathcal{O}$ in $ϕ^4$ theory in two dimensions. We show how to use the Hamiltonian eigenstates from LCT to obtain form factors that are matrix elements of a local operator $\mathcal{O}$ between single-particle bra and ket states, and we develop methods that significantly reduce errors resulting from the finite truncation of the Hilbert space. We extrapolate these form factors as a function of momentum to the regime where, by crossing symmetry, they are form factors of $\m…
This paper is a study of a spacelike-timelike conformal correspondence in QCD. When the times at vertices are fixed in an A_+ = 0 gauge calculation the distribution of gluons in a highly virtual decay have an exact correspondence with the gluons in the lightcone wavefunction of a high energy dipole with the identification of angles in the timelike case and transverse coordinates in the lightcone wavefunction. Divergences show up when the time integrals are done. A procedure for dropping these divergences, analogous to the Gell-Mann Low procedure in QED, allows one to define a conformal QCD, at…
We both review and augment the lightcone conformal truncation (LCT) method. LCT is a Hamiltonian truncation method for calculating dynamical quantities in QFT in infinite volume. This document is a self-contained, pedagogical introduction and "how-to" manual for LCT. We focus on 2D QFTs which have UV descriptions as free CFTs containing scalars, fermions, and gauge fields, providing a rich starting arena for LCT applications. Along our way, we develop several new techniques and innovations that greatly enhance the efficiency and applicability of LCT. These include the development of CFT radial…
Near lightcone correlators are dominated by operators with the lowest twist. We consider the contributions of such leading lowest twist multi-stress tensor operators to a heavy-heavy-light-light correlator in a CFT of any even dimensionality with a large central charge. An infinite number of such operators contribute, but their sum is described by a simple ansatz. We show that the coefficients in this ansatz can be determined recursively, thereby providing an operational procedure to compute them. This is achieved by bootstrapping the corresponding near lightcone correlator: conformal data for…
We explore the large spin spectrum in two-dimensional conformal field theories with a finite twist gap, using the modular bootstrap in the lightcone limit. By recursively solving the modular crossing equations associated to different $PSL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ elements, we identify the universal contribution to the density of large spin states from the vacuum in the dual channel. Our result takes the form of a sum over $PSL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ elements, whose leading term generalizes the usual Cardy formula to a wider regime. Rather curiously, the contribution to the density of states from the vacuum beco…
We compute numerically the dimensions and OPE coefficients of several operators in the 3d Ising CFT, and then try to reverse-engineer the solution to crossing symmetry analytically. Our key tool is a set of new techniques for computing infinite sums of SL(2,R) conformal blocks. Using these techniques, we solve the lightcone bootstrap to all orders in an asymptotic expansion in large spin, and suggest a strategy for going beyond the large spin limit. We carry out the first steps of this strategy for the 3d Ising CFT, deriving analytic approximations for the dimensions and OPE coefficients of se…
We present a prescription for an effective lightcone (LC) Hamiltonian that includes the effects of zero modes, focusing on the case of Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) deformed by relevant operators. We show how the prescription resolves a number of issues with LC quantization, including i) the apparent non-renormalization of the vacuum, ii) discrepancies in critical values of bare parameters in equal-time vs LC quantization, and iii) an inconsistency at large N in CFTs with simple AdS duals. We describe how LC quantization can drastically simplify Hamiltonian truncation methods applied to some…
We demonstrate that certain Virasoro characters (and their linear combinations) in minimal and non-minimal conformal models which admit factorized forms are manifestly related to the ADE series. This permits to extract quasi-particle spectra of a Lie algebraic nature which resembles the features of Toda field theory. These spectra possibly admit a construction in terms of the $W_n$-generators. In the course of our analysis we establish interrelations between the factorized characters related to the parafermionic models, the compactified boson and the minimal models.
We investigate linear combinations of characters for minimal Virasoro models which are representable as a products of several basic blocks. Our analysis is based on consideration of asymptotic behaviour of the characters in the quasi-classical limit. In particular, we introduce a notion of the secondary effective central charge. We find all possible cases for which factorization occurs on the base of the Gauss-Jacobi or the Watson identities. Exploiting these results, we establish various types of identities between different characters. In particular, we present several identities generalizin…
We analytically study the lightcone limit of the conformal bootstrap for 4-point functions containing scalars charged under global symmetries. We show the existence of large spin double-twist operators in various representations of the global symmetry group. We then compute their anomalous dimensions in terms of the central charge $C_T$, current central charge $C_J$, and the OPE coefficients of low dimension scalars. In AdS, these results correspond to the binding energy of two-particle states arising from the exchange of gravitons, gauge bosons, and light scalar fields. Using unitarity and cr…
For expansions in one-dimensional conformal blocks, we provide a rigorous link between the asymptotics of the spectral density of exchanged primaries and the leading singularity in the crossed channel. Our result has a direct application to systems of SL(2,R)-invariant correlators (also known as 1d CFTs). It also puts on solid ground a part of the lightcone bootstrap analysis of the spectrum of operators of high spin and bounded twist in CFTs in d>2. In addition, a similar argument controls the spectral density asymptotics in large N gauge theories.
We study the operator product expansion (OPE) of two identical scalar primary operators in the lightcone limit in a conformal field theory where a scalar is the operator with lowest twist. We see that in CFTs where both the stress tensor and a scalar are the lowest twist operators, the stress tensor contributes at the leading order in the lightcone OPE and the scalar contributes at the subleading order. We also see that there does not exist a scalar analogue of the average null energy condition (ANEC) for a CFT where a scalar is the lowest twist operator.
We analyze free conformal higher spin actions and the corresponding wave operators in arbitrary even dimensions and backgrounds. We show that the wave operators do not factorize in general, and identify the Weyl tensor and its derivatives as the obstruction to factorization. We give a manifestly factorized form for them on (A)dS backgrounds for arbitrary spin and on Einstein backgrounds for spin 2. We are also able to fix the conformal wave operator in d=4 for s=3 up to linear order in the Riemann tensor on generic Bach-flat backgrounds.
Although the energy spectrum of the Heisenberg spin chain on a circle defined by $H=\frac{1}{4}\sum_{k=1}^M(σ_k^xσ_{k+1}^x+σ_k^yσ_{k+1}^y +Δσ_k^zσ_{k+1}^z)$ is well known for any fixed $M$, the boundary conditions vary according to whether $M\in 4\mathbb{N}+r$, where $r=-1,0,1,2$, and also according to the parity of the number of overturned spins in the state, In string theory all these cases must be allowed because interactions involve a string with $M$ spins breaking into strings with $M_1<M$ and $M-M_1$ spins (or vice versa). We organize the energy spectrum and degeneracies of $H$ in the ca…
It is shown that Weyl spinors in 4D Minkowski space are composed of primary fields of half-integer conformal weights. This yields representations of fermionic 2-point functions in terms of correlators of primary fields with a factorized transformation behavior under the Lorentz group. I employ this observation to determine the general structure of the corresponding Lorentz covariant correlators by methods similar to the methods employed in conformal field theory to determine 2- and 3-point functions of primary fields. In particular, the chiral symmetry breaking terms resemble fermionic 2-point…
In strongly coupled conformal field theories with a large central charge important light degrees of freedom are the stress tensor and its composites, multi-stress tensors. We consider the OPE expansion of two-point functions of the stress tensor in thermal and heavy states and focus on the contributions from the stress tensor and double-stress tensors in four spacetime dimensions. We compare the results to the holographic finite temperature two-point functions and read off conformal data beyond the leading order in the large central charge expansion. In particular, we compute corrections to th…
We study three dimensional conformal field theories described by U(N) Chern-Simons theory at level k coupled to massless fermions in the fundamental representation. By solving a Schwinger-Dyson equation in lightcone gauge, we compute the exact planar free energy of the theory at finite temperature on R^2 as a function of the 't Hooft coupling lambda=N/k. Employing a dimensional reduction regularization scheme, we find that the free energy vanishes at |lambda|=1; the conformal theory does not exist for |lambda|>1. We analyze the operator spectrum via the anomalous conservation relation for high…
Highly energetic particles traveling in the background of an asymptotically AdS black hole experience a Shapiro time delay and an angle deflection. These quantities are related to the Regge limit of a heavy-heavy-light-light four-point function of scalar operators in the dual CFT. The Schwarzschild radius of the black hole in AdS units is proportional to the ratio of the conformal dimension of the heavy operator and the central charge. This ratio serves as a useful expansion parameter; its power counts the number of stress tensors in the multi-stress tensor operators which contribute to the fo…
We derive a generating function for all the 3-point functions of higher spin conserved currents in four dimensional conformal field theory. The resulting expressions have a rather surprising factorized form which suggest that they can all be realized by currents built from free massless fields of arbitrary (half-)integer spin s. This property is however not necessarily true also for the higher-point functions. As an illustration we analyze the general 4-point function of conserved abelian U(1) currents of scale dimension equal to three and find that apart from the two free field realizations t…
Motivated by the FRW-CFT proposal by Freivogel, Sekino, Susskind and Yeh, we compute the three-point function of a scalar field in a Coleman-De Luccia instanton background. We first compute the three-point function of the scalar field making only very mild assumptions about the scalar potential and the instanton background. We obtain the three-point function for points in the FRW patch of the CDL instanton and take two interesting limits; the limit where the three points are near the boundary of the hyperbolic slices of the FRW patch, and the limit where the three points lie on the past lightc…
In this article we investigate the structure of the four-point functions of the $AdS_3$-WZNW model. We consider the integral expression for the unflowed four-point correlator involving at least one state in the discrete part of the spectrum derived by analytic continuation from the $H_3^+$-WZNW model and we show that the conformal blocks can be obtained from those with an extremal-weight state by means of an intertwining operator. We adapt the procedure for dealing with correlators with a single unit of spectral flow charge and we get a factorized integral expression for the corresponding four…
We use Lightcone Conformal Truncation to analyze the RG flow of the two-dimensional supersymmetric Gross-Neveu-Yukawa theory, i.e. the theory of a real scalar superfield with a $\mathbb{Z}_2$-symmetric cubic superpotential. The theory depends on a single dimensionless coupling $\bar{g}$, and is expected to have a critical point at a tuned value $\bar{g}_*$ where it flows in the IR to the Tricritical Ising Model (TIM); the theory spontaneously breaks the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry on one side of this phase transition, and breaks SUSY on the other side. We calculate the spectrum of energies as a fu…
We compute $d$-dimensional scalar six-point conformal blocks in the two possible topologies allowed by the operator product expansion. Our computation is a simple application of the embedding space operator product expansion formalism developed recently. Scalar six-point conformal blocks in the comb channel have been determined not long ago, and we present here the first explicit computation of the scalar six-point conformal blocks in the remaining inequivalent topology. For obvious reason, we dub the other topology the snowflake channel. The scalar conformal blocks, with scalar external and e…
In this work we apply the lightcone bootstrap to a four-point function of scalars in two-dimensional conformal field theory. We include the entire Virasoro symmetry and consider non-rational theories with a gap in the spectrum from the vacuum and no conserved currents. For those theories, we compute the large dimension limit (h/c>>1) of the OPE spectral decomposition of the Virasoro vacuum. We then propose a kernel ansatz that generalizes the spectral decomposition beyond h/c>>1. Finally, we estimate the corrections to the OPE spectral densities from the inclusion of the lightest operator in t…
We compute the canonical partition function Z of non-interacting conformal higher spin (CHS) theory viewed as a collection of free spin s CFT's in R^d. We discuss in detail the 4-dimensional case (where s=1 is the standard Maxwell vector, s=2 is the Weyl graviton, etc.), but also present a generalization for all even dimensions d. Z may be found by counting the numbers of conformal operators and their descendants (modulo gauge identities and equations of motion) weighted by scaling dimensions. This conformal operator counting method requires a careful analysis of the structure of characters of…
We probe the conformal block structure of a scalar four-point function in $d\geq2$ conformal field theories by including higher-order derivative terms in a bulk gravitational action. We consider a heavy-light four-point function as the boundary correlator at large central charge. Such a four-point function can be computed, on the gravity side, as a two-point function of the light operator in a black hole geometry created by the heavy operator. We consider analytically solving the corresponding scalar field equation in a near-boundary expansion and find that the multi-stress tensor conformal bl…
We study conformal higher spin (CHS) fields on constant curvature backgrounds. By employing parent formulation technique in combination with tractor description of GJMS operators we find a manifestly factorized form of the CHS wave operators for symmetric fields of arbitrary integer spin $s$ and gauge invariance of arbitrary order $t\leq s$. In the case of the usual Fradkin-Tseytlin fields $t=1$ this gives a systematic derivation of the factorization formulas known in the literature while for $t>1$ the explicit formulas were not known. We also relate the gauge invariance of the CHS fields to t…
We revisit the familiar construction of one-loop scattering amplitudes via generalized unitarity in light of the recently understood properties of loop integrands prior to their integration. We show how in any four-dimensional quantum field theory, the integrand-level factorization of infrared divergences leads to twice as many constraints on integral coefficients than are visible from the integrated expressions. In the case of planar, maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills amplitudes, we demonstrate that these constraints are both sufficient and necessary to imply the finiteness and dual-conform…
We study the three-point energy correlator (EEEC), defined as a matrix element of a product of three energy detectors at different locations on the celestial sphere. Lorentz symmetry implies that the EEEC can be decomposed into special functions called celestial blocks. We compute three-point celestial blocks in an expansion around the collinear limit, where the three detectors approach each other on the celestial sphere. The leading term is a traditional $d{-}2$-dimensional four-point conformal block, and thus the collinear EEEC behaves like a conformally-invariant four-point function in $d{-…
Fixed points in three dimensions described by conformal field theories with $MN_{m,n}= O(m)^n\rtimes S_n$ global symmetry have extensive applications in critical phenomena. Associated experimental data for $m=n=2$ suggest the existence of two non-trivial fixed points, while the $\varepsilon$ expansion predicts only one, resulting in a puzzling state of affairs. A recent numerical conformal bootstrap study has found two kinks for small values of the parameters $m$ and $n$, with critical exponents in good agreement with experimental determinations in the $m=n=2$ case. In this paper we investigat…
In their recent paper \cite{Alday:2009aq} Alday, Gaiotto and Tachikawa proposed a relation between $\mathcal{N}=2$ four-dimensional supersymmetric gauge theories and two-dimensional conformal field theories. As part of their conjecture they gave an explicit combinatorial formula for the expansion of the conformal blocks inspired from the exact form of instanton part of the Nekrasov partition function. In this paper we study the origin of such an expansion from a CFT point of view. We consider the algebra $\mathcal{A}=\text{\sf Vir}\otimes\mathcal{H}$ which is the tensor product of mutually com…
Once famous and a little mysterious, AGT relations between Nekrasov functions and conformal blocks are now understood as the Hubbard-Stratanovich duality in the Dijkgraaf-Vafa (DV) phase of a peculiar Dotsenko-Fateev multi-logarithmic matrix model. However, it largely remains a collection of somewhat technical tricks, lacking a clear and generalizable conceptual interpretation. Our new claim is that the Nekrasov functions emerge in matrix models as a straightforward implication of superintegrability, factorization of peculiar matrix model averages. Recently, we demonstrated that, in the Gaussi…
We explore the conjectured duality between the critical O(N) vector model and minimal bosonic massless higher spin (HS) theory in AdS. In the boundary free theory, the conformal partial wave expansion (CPWE) of the four-point function of the scalar singlet bilinear is reorganized to make it explicitly crossing-symmetric and closed in the singlet sector, dual to the bulk HS gauge fields. We are able to analytically establish the factorized form of the fusion coefficients as well as the two-point function coefficient of the HS currents. We insist in directly computing the free correlators from b…