HEP Theory Journal Club

Effective holographic observables

Lampros Lamprou

Stanford

What natural CFT operators probe the bulk interior? And what can they teach us about effectively organizing the CFT degrees of freedom? I will make progress in these directions by relating integrals of bulk fields over geodesics or minimal surfaces to the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) on the boundary. I will review how conformal kinematics link geodesic operators in pure AdS to boundary OPE blocks and extend this relation to gravitationally dressed operators in AdS_3 using Virasoro symmetry. I will then introduce a new object, the semi-classical OPE block, and argue that: 1) it serves as the dual to geodesic operators in arbitrary dimensions and geometries, 2) it offers a new way of organizing correlation functions in excited states.