English

Virasoro conformal blocks in closed form

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-09-30 v2

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 cc. 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 cc. In both cases, the 1/c1/c 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.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:39:17.158Z