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Springer, Journal of High Energy Physics, 9(2018), 2018

DOI: 10.1007/jhep09(2018)150

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Bootstrapping the Spectral Function: On the Uniqueness of Liouville and the Universality of BTZ

Journal article published in 2017 by Scott Collier, Petr Kravchuk ORCID, Ying-Hsuan Lin, Xi Yin
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

We introduce spectral functions that capture the distribution of OPE coefficients and density of states in two-dimensional conformal field theories, and show that nontrivial upper and lower bounds on the spectral function can be obtained from semidefinite programming. We find substantial numerical evidence indicating that OPEs involving only scalar Virasoro primaries in a c>1 CFT are necessarily governed by the structure constants of Liouville theory. Combining this with analytic results in modular bootstrap, we conjecture that Liouville theory is the unique unitary c>1 CFT whose primaries have bounded spins. We also use the spectral function method to study modular constraints on CFT spectra, and discuss some implications of our results on CFTs of large c and large gap, in particular, to what extent the BTZ spectral density is universal. ; Comment: 44 pages, 15 figures