ITMP Seminar "Recursion Relations for Five-Point Conformal Blocks and Beyond: A Practical Approach"

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the next ITMP seminar will be held on Wednesday, Apr 20, at 18:00 (Moscow time). It will be arranged via zoom.

Please, find below the seminar information as well as information required for joining the meeting via Zoom.

Speaker: Dr. Valentina Prilepina, ITMP

Title: Recursion Relations for Five-Point Conformal Blocks and Beyond: A Practical Approach 

Abstract:  In this talk, I will consider five-point functions in conformal field theories (CFTs) in d > 2 spacetime dimensions. I will put forward a concrete and practical approach to computing global conformal blocks that appear in five-point functions of arbitrary scalar operators in general CFTs. By exploiting the weight-shifting operator formalism, I will construct a simple set of recursion relations for generating five-point blocks for arbitrary symmetric traceless exchange, which may be utilized to reduce such blocks to linear combinations of scalar exchange blocks with shifted external dimensions. Throughout, I will restrict attention to parity-even five-point functions in parity-preserving CFTs. Our results may be seen as a natural generalization of the work of Dolan and Osborn to the 5-point case. Moving beyond the external scalar case, I will consider how to promote one of the external scalars to a spin-1 or a spin-2 operator. I will show a way to derive additional recursion relations which encode these blocks in terms of combinations of weight shifting operators acting on the seed blocks for external scalars. I will comment on one possible application of these results. Lastly, I will reach beyond five-point functions to describe some ongoing work on generalizations of such techniques to six-point functions. I will also comment on our current attempts to bootstrap the 3D Ising model via five-point blocks.

If you want to join the seminar please register here.

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