CFT-data, Regge trajectories, and a mystery of missing local operators

by Johan Henriksson (Saclay)

Friday 5 Apr 2024, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Stockholm

Albano 3: 6228 - Mega (22 seats) (Albano Building 3)

Abstract: Besides local operators, a natural set of observables in Lorentzian
CFT are given by light-ray operators, which are defined for continuous
values of spin and interpolate the between the local operators, thus
forming Regge trajectories. I will discuss the general structure of
the spectrum of local and light-ray operators in CFT using the
Wilson-Fisher fixed-point as an example. This structure leads to a
puzzle: while the number of local operators increases with spin, the
number of light-ray operators should stay the same, since their data
is analytic in spin. This naively would require infinitely many
vanishing conditions for OPE coefficients along the Regge
trajectories. I will present recent work where we resolve this puzzle
by explaining how the infinitely many conditions follow from a single
condition related to the natural normalisation of the light-ray
operators.