Heavy-Heavy-Light Asymptotics from Thermal Correlators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new inversion formula for thermal one-point functions in 3D conformal field theories, enabling precise asymptotic calculations of spectral densities and OPE coefficients for heavy operators, validated against free theories.

Contribution

We develop a novel inversion formula derived from Casimir equations and systematic expansion methods for spectral densities and OPE coefficients in the heavy operator regime.

Findings

Excellent agreement with analytic predictions.

Up to three orders of magnitude improvement over previous estimates.

Effective extension of Casimir recursion methods into heavy exchange regime.

Abstract

We revisit the calculation of spectral densities and heavy-heavy-light (HHL) operator product expansion (OPE) coefficients in three-dimensional conformal field theories using thermal one-point functions on $S^1 \times S^2$. A central element of our analysis is a new inversion formula for one-point functions which is derived via Casimir differential equations. We develop systematic expansions of the spectral density and HHL OPE coefficients in the regime of large $\Delta_H$. We validate our analytic tools by comparing the results with the partial wave expansions of thermal one-point functions in free field theories. The algorithms developed for these expansions make full use of Casimir recursion relations, thereby extending their applicability into the heavy exchange regime. In the end, we observe excellent agreement with our analytic predictions and an improvement of up to three orders of magnitude compared to all previous leading order estimates of the CFT data even for moderate values of $\Delta_H$.