English

Typicality and thermality in 2d CFT

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-08-02 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We identify typical high energy eigenstates in two-dimensional conformal field theories at finite cc and establish that correlation functions of the stress tensor in such states are accurately thermal as defined by the standard canonical ensemble. Typical states of dimension hh are shown to be typical level h/ch/c descendants. In the AdS3_3/CFT2_2 correspondence, it is such states that should be compared to black holes in the bulk. We also discuss the discrepancy between thermal correlators and those computed in high energy primary states: the latter are reproduced instead by a generalized Gibbs ensemble with extreme values chosen for the chemical potentials conjugate to the KdV charges.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.00668,
  title  = {Typicality and thermality in 2d CFT},
  author = {Shouvik Datta and Per Kraus and Ben Michel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.00668},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

27 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:24:59.732Z