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Qiao, Jiaxin

Publications and source records attributed to Qiao, Jiaxin.

Twist Accumulation in Conformal Field Theory: A Rigorous Approach to the Lightcone Bootstrap

We prove that in any unitary CFT, a twist gap in the spectrum of operator product expansion (OPE) of identical scalar quasiprimary operators (i.e. Φ x Φ) implies the existence of a family of quasiprimary operators O τ,l with spins l → ∞ and twists τ → 2Δ Φ in the same OPE spectrum. A similar twist-accumulation result is proven for any two-dimensional Virasoro-invariant, modular-invariant, unitary CFT with a normalizable vacuum and central charge c > 1, where we show that a twist gap in the spectrum of Virasoro primaries implies the existence of a family of Virasoro primaries Oh, $\overline{h}$ with h → ∞ and $\overline{h}$→ c-1/24 (the same is true with h and $\overline{h}$ interchanged). Here, we summarize the similarity of the two problems and propose a general formulation of the lightcone bootstrap.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Distributions in CFT. Part II. Minkowski space

CFTs in Euclidean signature satisfy well-accepted rules, such as the convergent Euclidean OPE. It is nowadays common to assume that CFT correlators exist and have various properties also in Lorentzian signature. Some of these properties may represent extra assumptions, and it is an open question if they hold for familiar statistical-physics CFTs such as the critical 3d Ising model. Here we consider Wightman 4-point functions of scalar primaries in Lorentzian signature. We derive a minimal set of their properties solely from the Euclidean unitary CFT axioms, without using extra assumptions. We establish all Wightman axioms (temperedness, spectral property, local commutativity, clustering), Lorentzian conformal invariance, and distributional convergence of the s-channel Lorentzian OPE. This is done constructively, by analytically continuing the 4-point functions using the s-channel OPE expansion in the radial cross-ratios ρ, ρ¯. We prove a key fact that |ρ|, |ρ¯| < 1 inside the forward tube, and set bounds on how fast |ρ|, |ρ¯| may tend to 1 when approaching the Minkowski space.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Distributions in CFT. Part I. Cross-ratio space

We show that the four-point functions in conformal field theory are defined as distributions on the boundary of the region of convergence of the conformal block expansion. The conformal block expansion converges in the sense of distributions on this boundary, i.e. it can be integrated term by term against appropriate test functions. This can be interpreted as a giving a new class of functionals that satisfy the swapping property when applied to the crossing equation, and we comment on the relation of our construction to other types of functionals. Our language is useful in all considerations involving the boundary of the region of convergence, e.g. for deriving the dispersion relations. We establish our results by elementary methods, relying only on crossing symmetry and the standard convergence properties of the conformal block expansion. This is the first in a series of papers on distributional properties of correlation functions in conformal field theory.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗