HEP Theory Journal Club

Witten diagrams and the geometry of conformal blocks

Eliot Hijano

UBC

In this talk I will discuss the relation between conformal blocks and anti-de Sitter gravity (AdS) through the AdS/CFT correspondence. I will describe a new method for decomposing Witten diagrams into conformal blocks, and introduce “geodesic Witten diagrams” which provide an intuitive geometric bulk description of a conformal block. I will also present a unified framework for the holographic computation of Virasoro and W_N conformal blocks at large central charge.