The 3d stress-tensor bootstrap

Anatoly Dymarsky, Filip Kos, Petr Kravchuk, David Poland, David Simmons-Duffin

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Abstract

We study the conformal bootstrap for 4-point functions of stress tensors in parity-preserving 3d CFTs. To set up the bootstrap equations, we analyze the constraints of conformal symmetry, permutation symmetry, and conservation on the stress-tensor 4-point function and identify a non-redundant set of crossing equations. Studying these equations numerically using semidefinite optimization, we compute bounds on the central charge as a function of the independent coefficient in the stress-tensor 3-point function. With no additional assumptions, these bounds numerically reproduce the conformal collider bounds and give a general lower bound on the central charge. We also study the effect of gaps in the scalar, spin-2, and spin-4 spectra on the central charge bound. We find general upper bounds on these gaps as well as tighter restrictions on the stress-tensor 3-point function coefficients for theories with moderate gaps. When the gap for the leading scalar or spin-2 operator is sufficiently large to exclude large N theories, we also obtain upper bounds on the central charge, thus finding compact allowed regions. Finally, assuming the known low-lying spectrum and central charge of the critical 3d Ising model, we determine its stress-tensor 3-point function and derive a bound on its leading parity-odd scalar.

Original language English 164 Journal of High Energy Physics 2018 2 https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2018)164 Published - Feb 1 2018

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We are grateful to Clay Córdova, Daliang Li, David Meltzer, João Penedones, Eric Perl-mutter, Slava Rychkov, Marco Serone, Emilio Trevisani, Alessandro Vichi, and Alexander Zhiboedov for discussions. We also thank Revant Nayar for collaboration in the initial stages of this work. Many thanks to the organizers and participants of the bootstrap collaboration workshops at Yale, Princeton, and ICTP São Paulo where part of this work was completed. AD is supported by NSF grant PHY-1720374. DSD is supported by DOE grant DE-SC0009988, a William D. Loughlin Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Simons Foundation grant 488657 (Simons Collaboration on the Nonperturba-tive Bootstrap). PK is supported by DOE grant DE-SC0011632. DP is supported by NSF grant PHY-1350180 and Simons Foundation grant 488651. The computations in this paper were run on the Omega and Grace computing clusters supported by the facilities and staff of the Yale University Faculty of Arts and Sciences High Performance Computing Center, on the Hyperion computing cluster supported by the School of Natural Sciences Computing Staff at the Institute for Advanced Study and on the computing clusters of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

© 2018, The Author(s).