Friday 13 March 2015

Virasoro conformal blocks in closed form

In a recent article, Perlmutter investigated closed-form expressions for Virasoro conformal blocks. As a complement to that article, let me discuss what is known on such expressions, and what they are good for.

The definition of conformal blocks is the subject of an interesting discussion at Physics.StackExchange. Basically, conformal blocks are the universal building blocks of correlation functions, and are determined by conformal symmetry.

Wednesday 11 March 2015

Conformal blocks at Physics.StackExchange

I realized that the first Google hit for "conformal blocks" was a discussion at Physics.StackExchange about "A pedestrian explanation of conformal blocks".
This discussion is quite interesting and there are a number of good quality answers. But these answers were written in the span a few days, and they do not amount to a complete or satisfactory explanation of conformal blocks.

Such an explanation should probably be written as a Wikipedia article. But before writing it, one should probably rewrite the article on conformal field theory, and more generally build a decent set of articles on that subject. So, as a quick fix, I just added my own explanation of conformal blocks to the discussion in question.