English

Harmonic analysis of 2d CFT partition functions

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-05-31 v3

Abstract

We apply the theory of harmonic analysis on the fundamental domain of SL(2,Z)SL(2,\mathbb{Z}) to partition functions of two-dimensional conformal field theories. We decompose the partition function of cc free bosons on a Narain lattice into eigenfunctions of the Laplacian of worldsheet moduli space H/SL(2,Z)\mathbb H/SL(2,\mathbb Z), and of target space moduli space O(c,c;Z)\O(c,c;R)/O(c)×O(c)O(c,c;\mathbb Z)\backslash O(c,c;\mathbb R)/O(c)\times O(c). This decomposition manifests certain properties of Narain theories and ensemble averages thereof. We extend the application of spectral theory to partition functions of general two-dimensional conformal field theories, and explore its meaning in connection to AdS3_3 gravity. An implication of harmonic analysis is that the local operator spectrum is fully determined by a certain subset of degeneracies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.10744,
  title  = {Harmonic analysis of 2d CFT partition functions},
  author = {Nathan Benjamin and Scott Collier and A. Liam Fitzpatrick and Alexander Maloney and Eric Perlmutter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.10744},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

35+24 pages, v2: corrected a mistake in Sec 3, v3: minor errors fixed

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:26:07.879Z