Holographic variables for CFT2 conformal blocks with heavy operators

• Main Authors: Konstantin Alkalaev, Mikhail Pavlov
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2020-07-01
• Series: Nuclear Physics B
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0550321320301048

We consider large-c n-point Virasoro blocks with n−k background heavy operators and k perturbative heavy operators. Conformal dimensions of heavy operators scale linearly with large c, while splitting into background/perturbative operators assumes an additional perturbative expansion. Such conformal blocks can be calculated within the monodromy method that basically reduces to solving auxiliary Fuchsian second-order equation and finding monodromy of solutions. We show that there exist particular variables that we call holographic, use of which drastically simplifies the whole analysis. In consequence, we formulate the uniformization property of the large-c blocks which states that in the holographic variables their form depends only on the number of perturbative heavy operators. On the other hand, the holographic variables encode the metric in the bulk space so that the conformal blocks with the same number of perturbative operators are calculated by the same geodesic trees but on different geometries created by the background operators.