Higher-Point Conformal Blocks PDF Download

Author: Wen-Jie Ma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
Conformal field theories (CFTs) play a central role in modern theoretical physics. The study of CFTs leads to a deep understanding of both string theory and condensed matter physics. In a CFT, correlation functions are essential ingredients for the computation of physical observables. Due to the existence of the operator product expansion (OPE), conformal correlation functions can be separated into their dynamical parts, which constitute of the OPE coefficients as well as the conformal dimensions, and their kinematic parts, dubbed the conformal blocks, which are completely fixed by conformal symmetry. Since the conformal bootstrap was revived in 2008, several techniques have been developed to compute the four-point conformal blocks during the last decade. In contrast to the four-point blocks, conformal blocks with more than four points, which are notoriously difficult to compute, have not been studied in great detail, although these higher-point conformal blocks are useful for the implementation of higher-point conformal bootstrap as well as the study of AdS Witten diagrams. In this thesis, by using the embedding space OPE, we obtain expressions for the scalar M-point conformal blocks with scalar exchanges in the comb configuration as well as scalar six-and seven-point conformal blocks with scalar exchanges in the snowflake and extended snowflake configurations. Moreover, we propose a set of Feynman-like rules to directly write down an explicit form for any global conformal block in one and two dimensions. Based on the position space OPE, we prove the Feynman-like rules by construction. Finally, after discussing the symmetry properties of the conformal blocks, we develop a systematical way to write down the bootstrap equations for higher-point correlation functions.