Speaker
Description
Conformal blocks are used to study the correlation functions of conformal field theories; quantum field theories which are invariant under conformal transformations. A consideration affecting the use of conformal blocks is that they can be difficult to compute efficiently. The anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence, a conjectured duality with wide applications in theoretical physics, provides a way to overcome this difficulty. It does so by addressing computationally-complicated conformal blocks through more manageable geodesic Witten diagrams, which are their geometric configuration within the dual anti-de Sitter space. The resulting integral representations of the conformal blocks provide a more efficient way to compute them numerically than the traditional series expansion techniques. This presentation will provide a background to the calculation of conformal blocks through geodesic Witten diagrams within the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, and discuss current research on their ensuing integral representations.
