Geodesic Witten Diagrams Research Articles

Regge conformal blocks from the Rindler-AdS black hole and the pole-skipping phenomena

We study a holographic construction of conformal blocks in the Regge limit of four-point scalar correlation functions by using coordinates of the two-sided Rindler-AdS black hole. As a generalization of geodesic Witten diagrams, we construct diagrams with four external scalar fields in the Rindler-AdS black hole by integrating over two half-geodesics between the centers of Penrose diagrams and points at the AdS boundary. We demonstrate that late-time behaviors of the diagrams coincide with the Regge behaviors of conformal blocks. We also point out their relevance with the pole-skipping phenomena by showing that the near-horizon analysis of symmetric traceless fields with any integer spin in the Rindler-AdS black hole can capture the Regge behaviors of conformal blocks.

Chaos in CFT dual to rotating BTZ

We compute out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) in two-dimensional holographic conformal field theories (CFTs) with different left- and right-moving temperatures. Depending on whether the CFT lives on a spatial line or circle, the dual bulk geometry is a boosted BTZ black brane or a rotating BTZ black hole. In the case when the spatial direction is non-compact, we generalise a computation of Roberts and Stanford and show that to reproduce the correct bulk answer a maximal channel contribution needs to be selected when using the identity block approximation. We use the correspondence between global conformal blocks and geodesic Witten diagrams to extend our results to CFTs on a spatial circle.In [1] it was shown that the OTOC for a rotating BTZ black hole exhibits a periodic modulation about an average exponential decay with Lyapunov exponent 2π/β. In the extremal limit where the black hole is maximally rotating, it was shown in [2] that the OTOC exhibits an average cubic growth, on which is superposed a sawtooth pattern which has small periods of Lyapunov growth due to the non-zero temperature of left-movers in the dual CFT. Our computations explain these results from a dual CFT perspective.

Bulk interactions and boundary dual of higher-spin-charged particles

We consider higher-spin gravity in (Euclidean) AdS4, dual to a free vector model on the 3d boundary. In the bulk theory, we study the linearized version of the Didenko-Vasiliev black hole solution: a particle that couples to the gauge fields of all spins through a BPS-like pattern of charges. We study the interaction between two such particles at leading order. The sum over spins cancels the UV divergences that occur when the two particles are brought close together, for (almost) any value of the relative velocity. This is a higher-spin enhancement of supergravity’s famous feature, the cancellation of the electric and gravitational forces between two BPS particles at rest. In the holographic context, we point out that these “Didenko-Vasiliev particles” are just the bulk duals of bilocal operators in the boundary theory. For this identification, we use the Penrose transform between bulk fields and twistor functions, together with its holographic dual that relates twistor functions to boundary sources. In the resulting picture, the interaction between two Didenko-Vasiliev particles is just a geodesic Witten diagram that calculates the correlator of two boundary bilocals. We speculate on implications for a possible reformulation of the bulk theory, and for its non-locality issues.

Quantum vs. classical information: operator negativity as a probe of scrambling

We consider the logarithmic negativity and related quantities of time evolution operators. We study free fermion, compact boson, and holographic conformal field theories (CFTs) as well as numerical simulations of random unitary circuits and integrable and chaotic spin chains. The holographic behavior strongly deviates from known non- holographic CFT results and displays clear signatures of maximal scrambling. Intriguingly, the random unitary circuits display nearly identical behavior to the holographic channels. Generically, we find the “line-tension picture” to effectively capture the entanglement dynamics for chaotic systems and the “quasi-particle picture” for integrable systems. With this motivation, we propose an effective “line-tension” that captures the dynamics of the logarithmic negativity in chaotic systems in the spacetime scaling limit. We compare the negativity and mutual information leading us to find distinct dynamics of quantum and classical information. The “spurious entanglement” we observe may have implications on the “simulatability” of quantum systems on classical computers. Finally, we elucidate the connection between the operation of partially transposing a density matrix in conformal field theory and the entanglement wedge cross section in Anti-de Sitter space using geodesic Witten diagrams.

Propagator identities, holographic conformal blocks, and higher-point AdS diagrams

Conformal blocks are the fundamental, theory-independent building blocks in any CFT, so it is important to understand their holographic representation in the context of AdS/CFT. We describe how to systematically extract the holographic objects which compute higher-point global (scalar) conformal blocks in arbitrary spacetime dimensions, extending the result for the four-point block, known in the literature as a geodesic Witten diagram, to five- and six-point blocks. The main new tools which allow us to obtain such representations are various higher-point propagator identities, which can be interpreted as generalizations of the well-known flat space star-triangle identity, and which compute integrals over products of three bulk-to-bulk and/or bulk-to-boundary propagators in negatively curved spacetime. Using the holographic representation of the higher-point conformal blocks and higher-point propagator identities, we develop geodesic diagram techniques to obtain the explicit direct-channel conformal block decomposition of a broad class of higher-point AdS diagrams in a scalar effective bulk theory, with closed-form expressions for the decomposition coefficients. These methods require only certain elementary manipulations and no bulk integration, and furthermore provide quite trivially a simple algebraic origin of the logarithmic singularities of higher-point tree-level AdS diagrams. We also provide a more compact repackaging in terms of the spectral decomposition of the same diagrams, as well as an independent discussion on the closely related but computationally simpler framework over p-adics which admits comparable statements for all previously mentioned results.

A geodesic Witten diagram description of holographic entanglement entropy and its quantum corrections

We use the formalism of geodesic Witten diagrams to study the holographic realization of the conformal block expansion for entanglement entropy of two disjoint intervals. The agreement between the Ryu-Takayanagi formula and the identity block contribution has a dual realization as the product of bulk to boundary propagators. Quantum bulk corrections instead arise from stripped higher order diagrams and back-reaction effects; these are also mapped to the structure for GN0 terms found in [15], with the former identified as the bulk entanglement entropy across the Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces. An independent derivation of this last statement is provided by implementing a twist-line formalism in the bulk, and additional checks from the computation of mutual information and single interval entanglement entropy. Finally an interesting correspondence is found between the recently proposed holographic entanglement of purification, and an approximated form for certain 1/c Rényi entropies corrections.

Comments on spinning OPE blocks in AdS3/CFT2

We extend the work of [48], [49], to obtain an integral expression of OPE blocks for spinning primaries in CFT2. We observe, when the OPE blocks are made out of conserved spinning primaries, the integral becomes a product of two copies of weighted AdS2 fields, smeared along geodesics. In this way, conserved current OPE blocks in CFT2 have a different representation in terms of AdS2 geodesic operators, in stead of viewing them as AdS3 geodesic operators. We also show, how this representation can be related to AdS3 massless higher spin fields through HKLL bulk field reconstruction. Using this picture, we consistently obtain the closed form expression of four point spinning conformal block as a product of two AdS2 Geodesic Witten diagrams.

Fermions in geodesic Witten diagrams

We develop the embedding formalism for odd dimensional Dirac spinors in AdS and apply it to the (geodesic) Witten diagrams including fermionic degrees of freedom. We first show that the geodesic Witten diagram (GWD) with fermion exchange is equivalent to the conformal partial waves associated with the spin one-half primary field. Then, we explicitly demonstrate the GWD decomposition of the Witten diagram including the fermion exchange with the aid of the split representation. The geodesic representation of CPW indeed gives the useful basis for computing the Witten diagrams.

More on boundary holographic Witten diagrams

In this paper we discuss geodesic Witten diagrams in general holographic conformal field theories with boundary or defect. In boundary or defect conformal field theory, two-point functions are non-trivial and can be decomposed into conformal blocks in two distinct ways; ambient channel decomposition and boundary channel decomposition. In our previous work we only consider two-point functions of same operators. We generalize our previous work to a situation where operators in two-point functions are different. We obtain two distinct decomposition for two-point functions of different operators.

Spinning geodesic Witten diagrams

We present an expression for the four-point conformal blocks of symmetric traceless operators of arbitrary spin as an integral over a pair of geodesics in Anti-de Sitter space, generalizing the geodesic Witten diagram formalism of Hijano et al. [1] to arbitrary spin. As an intermediate step in the derivation, we identify a convenient basis of bulk threepoint interaction vertices which give rise to all possible boundary three point structures. We highlight a direct connection between the representation of the conformal block as geodesic Witten diagram and the shadow operator formalism.

Geodesic Witten diagrams with antisymmetric tensor exchange

We show the AdS/CFT correspondence between the conformal partial wave and the geodesic Witten diagram with anti-symmetric exchange. To this end, we introduce the embedding space formalism for anti-symmetric fields in AdS. Then we prove that the geodesic Witten diagram satisfies the conformal Casimir equation and the appropriate boundary condition. Furthermore, we discuss the connection between the geodesic Witten diagram and the shadow formalism by using the split representation of harmonic function for anti-symmetric fields. We also discuss the 3pt geodesic Witten diagrams and its extension to the mixed-symmetric tensors.

The Mellin formalism for boundary CFTd

We extend the Mellin representation of conformal field theory (CFT) to allow for conformal boundaries and interfaces. We consider the simplest holographic setup dual to an interface CFT — a brane filling an AdSd subspace of AdSd+1 — and perform a systematic study of Witten diagrams in this setup. As a byproduct of our analysis, we show that geodesic Witten diagrams in this geometry reproduce interface CFTd conformal blocks, generalizing the analogous statement for CFTs with no defects.

Conformal correlators and blocks with spinors in general dimensions

We compute conformal correlation functions with spinor, tensor, and spinor-tensor primary fields in general dimensions with Euclidean and Lorentzian metrics. The spinors are taken to be Dirac spinors, which exist for any dimensions. For this, the embedding space formalism is employed and the polarisation spinors are introduced to simplify the computations. Three-point functions are rewritten in terms of differential operators acting on scalar-scalar-tensor correlation functions. This enables us to determine conformal blocks for four-point functions with scalar and spinor fields by acting the differential operators on scalar conformal blocks, which will be useful in finding their geodesic Witten diagrams.

Boundary holographic Witten diagrams

In this paper we discuss geodesic Witten diagrams in generic holographic conformal field theories with boundary or defect. Boundary CFTs allow two different de-compositions of two-point functions into conformal blocks: boundary channel and ambient channel. Building on earlier work, we derive a holographic dual of the boundary channel decomposition in terms of bulk-to-bulk propagators on lower dimensional AdS slices. In the situation in which we can treat the boundary or defect as a perturbation around pure AdS spacetime, we obtain the leading corrections to the two-point function both in boundary and ambient channel in terms of geodesic Witten diagrams which exactly reproduce the decomposition into corresponding conformal blocks on the field theory side.

Geodesic diagrams, gravitational interactions & OPE structures

We give a systematic procedure to evaluate conformal partial waves involving symmetric tensors for an arbitrary CFTd using geodesic Witten diagrams in AdSd+1. Using this procedure we discuss how to draw a line between the tensor structures in the CFT and cubic interactions in AdS. We contrast this map to known results using three-point Witten diagrams: the maps obtained via volume versus geodesic integrals differ. Despite these differences, we show how to decompose four-point exchange Witten diagrams in terms of geodesic diagrams, and we discuss the product expansion of local bulk fields in AdS.

Anatomy of geodesic Witten diagrams

We revisit the so-called “Geodesic Witten Diagrams” (GWDs) [1], proposed to be the holographic dual configuration of scalar conformal partial waves, from the perspectives of CFT operator product expansions. To this end, we explicitly consider three point GWDs which are natural building blocks of all possible four point GWDs, discuss their gluing procedure through integration over spectral parameter, and this leads us to a direct identification with the integral representation of CFT conformal partial waves. As a main application of this general construction, we consider the holographic dual of the conformal partial waves for external primary operators with spins. Moreover, we consider the closely related “split representation” for the bulk to bulk spinning propagator, to demonstrate how ordinary scalar Witten diagram with arbitrary spin exchange, can be systematically decomposed into scalar GWDs. We also discuss how to generalize to spinning cases.

Geodesic Witten diagrams with an external spinning field

We explore AdS/CFT correspondence between geodesic Witten diagrams and conformal blocks (conformal partial waves) with an external symmetric traceless tensor field. We derive an expression for the conformal partial wave with an external spin-1 field and show that this expression is equivalent to the amplitude of the geodesic Witten diagram. We also show the equivalence by using conformal Casimir equation in embedding formalism. Furthermore, we extend the construction of the amplitude of the geodesic Witten diagram to an external arbitrary symmetric traceless tensor field. We show our construction agrees with the known result of the conformal partial waves.

A stereoscopic look into the bulk

We present the foundation for a holographic dictionary with depth perception. The dictionary consists of natural CFT operators whose duals are simple, diffeomorphism-invariant bulk operators. The CFT operators of interest are the "OPE blocks," contributions to the OPE from a single conformal family. In holographic theories, we show that the OPE blocks are dual at leading order in 1/N to integrals of effective bulk fields along geodesics or homogeneous minimal surfaces in anti-de Sitter space. One widely studied example of an OPE block is the modular Hamiltonian, which is dual to the fluctuation in the area of a minimal surface. Thus, our operators pave the way for generalizing the Ryu-Takayanagi relation to other bulk fields. Although the OPE blocks are non-local operators in the CFT, they admit a simple geometric description as fields in kinematic space--the space of pairs of CFT points. We develop the tools for constructing local bulk operators in terms of these non-local objects. The OPE blocks also allow for conceptually clean and technically simple derivations of many results known in the literature, including linearized Einstein's equations and the relation between conformal blocks and geodesic Witten diagrams.

Conformal blocks beyond the semi-classical limit

c. We compute Virasoro blocks in the heavy-light, large c limit, extending our previous results by determining perturbative 1=c corrections. We obtain explicit closed-form expressions for both the ‘semi-classical’ h 2 =c 2 and ‘quantum’ hL=c 2 corrections to the vacuum block, and we provide integral formulas for general Virasoro blocks. We comment on the interpretation of our results for thermodynamics, discussing how monodromies in Euclidean time can arise from AdS calculations using ‘geodesic Witten diagrams’. We expect that only non-perturbative corrections in 1=c can resolve the singularities associated with the information paradox.

Witten diagrams revisited: the AdS geometry of conformal blocks

We develop a new method for decomposing Witten diagrams into conformal blocks. The steps involved are elementary, requiring no explicit integration, and operate directly in position space. Central to this construction is an appealingly simple answer to the question: what object in AdS computes a conformal block? The answer is a "geodesic Witten diagram," which is essentially an ordinary exchange Witten diagram, except that the cubic vertices are not integrated over all of AdS, but only over bulk geodesics connecting the boundary operators. In particular, we consider the case of four-point functions of scalar operators, and show how to easily reproduce existing results for the relevant conformal blocks in arbitrary dimension.