Thermal Stress Tensor Correlators, OPE and Holography

TL;DR

This paper analyzes stress tensor correlators in strongly coupled conformal field theories at finite temperature, comparing OPE expansions with holographic results to extract conformal data and operator dimensions beyond leading order.

Contribution

It provides new calculations of OPE coefficients and anomalous dimensions of double-stress tensor operators in four-dimensional CFTs at large central charge, using holography.

Findings

Computed corrections to OPE coefficients affecting near-lightcone behavior.

Determined anomalous dimensions of double-stress tensor operators.

Compared field theory and holographic correlators to extract conformal data.

Abstract

In strongly coupled conformal field theories with a large central charge important light degrees of freedom are the stress tensor and its composites, multi-stress tensors. We consider the OPE expansion of two-point functions of the stress tensor in thermal and heavy states and focus on the contributions from the stress tensor and double-stress tensors in four spacetime dimensions. We compare the results to the holographic finite temperature two-point functions and read off conformal data beyond the leading order in the large central charge expansion. In particular, we compute corrections to the OPE coefficients which determine the near-lightcone behavior of the correlators. We also compute the anomalous dimensions of the double-stress tensor operators.