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Quantum Regge trajectories and the Virasoro analytic bootstrap

Journal Article · · Journal of High Energy Physics (Online)
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4]
  1. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States); DOE/OSTI
  2. McGill Univ., Montreal, QC (Canada)
  3. McGill Univ., Montreal, QC (Canada); Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, CA (United States)
  4. California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States). Walter Burke Inst. for Theoretical Physics
Every conformal field theory (CFT) above two dimensions contains an infinite set of Regge trajectories of local operators which, at large spin, asymptote to “double-twist” composites with vanishing anomalous dimension. In two dimensions, due to the existence of local conformal symmetry, this and other central results of the conformal bootstrap do not apply. We incorporate exact stress tensor dynamics into the CFT2 analytic bootstrap, and extract several implications for AdS3 quantum gravity. Our main tool is the Virasoro fusion kernel, which we newly analyze and interpret in the bootstrap context. The contribution to double-twist data from the Virasoro vacuum module defines a “Virasoro Mean Field Theory” (VMFT); its spectrum includes a finite number of discrete Regge trajectories, whose dimensions obey a simple formula exact in the central charge c and external operator dimensions. We then show that VMFT provides a baseline for large spin universality in two dimensions: in every unitary compact CFT2 with c > 1 and a twist gap above the vacuum, the double-twist data approaches that of VMFT at large spin ℓ. Corrections to the large spin spectrum from individual non-vacuum primaries are exponentially small in √ℓ for fixed c. We analyze our results in various large c limits. Further applications include a derivation of the late-time behavior of Virasoro blocks at generic c; a refined understanding and new derivation of heavy-light blocks; and the determination of the cross-channel limit of generic Virasoro blocks. We deduce non-perturbative results about the bound state spectrum and dynamics of quantum gravity in AdS3.
Research Organization:
California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
National Science Foundation (NSF); Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; Simons Foundation; USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP) (SC-25); Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0011632
OSTI ID:
1611635
Journal Information:
Journal of High Energy Physics (Online), Journal Name: Journal of High Energy Physics (Online) Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 2019; ISSN 1029-8479
Publisher:
Springer BerlinCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Cited By (19)

The quasi-particle picture and its breakdown after local quenches: mutual information, negativity, and reflected entropy journal March 2021
The Virasoro fusion kernel and Ruijsenaars’ hypergeometric function journal January 2021
Quantum thermalization and Virasoro symmetry journal June 2020
Bounds on the density of states and the spectral gap in CFT$_{2}$ text January 2019
Aspects of the S transformation Bootstrap text January 2019
Beurling-Selberg Extremization and Modular Bootstrap at High Energies text January 2020
Confluent Conformal Blocks of the Second Kind text January 2020
Virasoro blocks at large exchange dimension text January 2020
Discreteness and Integrality in Conformal Field Theory text January 2020
Analytic Bootstrap for Perturbative Conformal Field Theories preprint January 2020
Bound on asymptotics of magnitude of three point coefficients in 2D CFT journal January 2020
An inelastic bound on chaos journal July 2019
Entanglement entropy, OTOC and bootstrap in 2D CFTs from Regge and light cone limits of multi-point conformal block journal August 2019
Quantum corrections to the BTZ black hole extremality bound from the conformal bootstrap journal December 2019
Barrier from chaos: operator entanglement dynamics of the reduced density matrix journal December 2019
Light-cone modular bootstrap and pure gravity journal September 2019
Entanglement Entropy after Double Excitation as an Interaction Measure journal February 2020
Bound on asymptotics of magnitude of three point coefficients in 2D CFT text January 2019
Entanglement Entropy after Double-Excitation as Interaction Measure text January 2019

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