Thermal CFTs in momentum space


Abstract in English

We study some aspects of conformal field theories at finite temperature in momentum space. We provide a formula for the Fourier transform of a thermal conformal block and study its analytic properties. In particular we show that the Fourier transform vanishes when the conformal dimension and spin are those of a double twist operator $Delta = 2Delta_phi + ell + 2n$. By analytically continuing to Lorentzian signature we show that the spectral density at high spatial momenta has support on the spectrum condition $|omega| > |k|$. This leads to a series of sum rules. Finally, we explicitly match the thermal block expansion with the momentum space Greens function at finite temperature in several examples.

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