Virasoro conformal blocks in closed form
Abstract
Virasoro conformal blocks are fixed in principle by symmetry, but a closed-form expression is unknown in the general case. In this work, we provide three closed-form expansions for the four-point Virasoro blocks on the sphere, for arbitrary operator dimensions and central charge . We do so by solving known recursion relations. One representation is a sum over hypergeometric global blocks, whose coefficients we provide at arbitrary level. Another is a sum over semiclassical Virasoro blocks obtained in the limit in which two external operator dimensions scale linearly with large . In both cases, the expansion of the Virasoro blocks is easily extracted. We discuss applications of these expansions to entanglement and thermality in conformal field theories and particle scattering in three-dimensional quantum gravity.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1502.07742,
title = {Virasoro conformal blocks in closed form},
author = {Eric Perlmutter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.07742},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
24 pages + appendices. v2: added refs, minor corrections, improved discussion of Sec. 2