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arXiv:1907.05147 · Physics Reports

Weizmann lectures on the numerical conformal bootstrap

Shai M. Chester

Published Nov 2, 2023• 52 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

These lectures were given at the Weizmann Institute in the spring of 2019. They are intended to familiarize students with the nuts and bolts of the numerical bootstrap as efficiently as possible. After a brief review of the basics of conformal field theory in d>2 spacetime dimensions, we discuss how to compute conformal blocks, formulate the crossing equations as a semi-definite programming problem, solve this problem using SDPB on a personal computer, and interpret the results. We include worked examples for all steps, including bounds for 3d CFTs with Z2 or O(N) global symmetries. Each lecture includes a problem set, which culminate in a precise computation of the 3d Ising model critical exponents using the mixed correlator Z2 bootstrap. A Mathematica file is included that transforms crossing equations into the proper input form for SDPB.

DOI
10.1016/j.physrep.2023.10.008

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These lectures were given at the Weizmann Institute in the spring of 2019. They are intended to familiarize students with the nuts and bolts of the numerical bootstrap as efficiently as possible. After a brief review of the basics of conformal field theory in d>2 spacetime dimensions, we discuss how to compute conformal blocks, formulate the crossing equations as a semi-definite programming problem, solve this problem using SDPB on a personal computer, and interpret the results. We include worked examples for all steps, including bounds for 3d CFTs with Z2 or O(N) global symmetries. Each lecture includes a problem set, which culminate in a precise computation of the 3d Ising model critical exponents using the mixed correlator Z2 bootstrap. A Mathematica file is included that transforms crossing equations into the proper input form for SDPB.
These lectures notes are based on courses given at National Taiwan University, National Chiao-Tung University, and National Tsing Hua University in the spring term of 2015. Although the course was offered primarily for graduate students, these lecture notes have been prepared for a more general audience. They are intended as an introduction to conformal field theories in various dimensions, with applications related to topics of particular interest: topics include the conformal bootstrap program, boundary conformal field theory, and applications related to the AdS/CFT correspondence. We assume the reader to be familiar with quantum mechanics at the graduate level and to have some basic knowledge of quantum field theory. Familiarity with string theory is not a prerequisite for this lectures, although it can only help.
In this thesis, we introduce new tools for the conformal bootstrap, autoboot and qboot.Each tool solves a different step in the whole computational stack, and combined with an existing efficient tool SDPB which solves semidefinite programming (SDP), our tools make it easier to study conformal field theories with more complicated global symmetries and with more general spectra.In the introduction, we review how the conformal bootstrap method gives rich information about the theory at the fixed point of renormalization group, or in other words, the critical phenomena such as the Ising model at criticality.The following three sections focus on the theories behind the implementation of autoboot and qboot, and the explicit implementation, freely available at https://github.com/selpoG/autoboot/and https://github.com/selpoG/qboot/, is discussed in section 5. We also have two applications in the last section, the Ising model and the O(2) vector model in three dimensions, each of them has close relationship with a physical system in the real world.
We introduce the use of reinforcement-learning (RL) techniques to the conformal-bootstrap program.We demonstrate that suitable soft Actor-Critic RL algorithms can perform efficient, relatively cheap highdimensional searches in the space of scaling dimensions and OPE-squared coefficients that produce sensible results for tens of CFT data from a single crossing equation.In this paper we test this approach in well-known 2D CFTs, with particular focus on the Ising and tricritical Ising models and the free compactified boson CFT.We present results of as high as 36-dimensional searches, whose sole input is the expected number of operators per spin in a truncation of the conformal-block decomposition of the crossing equations.Our study of 2D CFTs uses only the global soð2; 2Þ part of the conformal algebra, and our methods are equally applicable to higher-dimensional CFTs.When combined with other, already available, numerical and analytical methods, we expect our approach to yield an exciting new window into the nonperturbative structure of arbitrary (unitary or nonunitary) CFTs.
This thesis explores the application of numerical bootstrap techniques to two-point functions of bulk insertions in the presence of a boundary in two-dimensional conformal field theories. The first part of this thesis is devoted to presenting a comprehensive introduction to essential concepts in the numerical bootstrap of two-dimensional CFTs. Namely, an extensive introduction to the basics of conformal field theories (CFTs), their properties arising from the algebraic structure of conformal transformations, consitency conditions on the observables in a CFT, as well as the effects of the presence of defects in two-dimensional CFTs, is given. This is followed by a quick recount of the numerical techniques employed in the literature to solve for the aforementioned consistency conditions. These chapters form an overview of the seminal works that set the backdrop of the contributions made in the second part of the thesis. In the contributions of the thesis, we discuss the progress made in the investigations in (Meineri and Radhakrishnan 2025) where two-point functions in BCFTs are bootstrapped by treating them as a part of a larger system of consistency conditions involving the partition function on an annulus, the two-point function in the presence of a boundary, and four-point functions on the infinite plane. This perspective of treating the two-point function as a part of a larger system makes accessible parts of the BCFT data that have so-far remained inaccessible, and we present results on the boundary gap in the two-point function, and improvements in existing numerical bounds on the boundary entropy.
The study of conformal symmetry is motivated through an example in statistical mechanics and then rigorously developed in quantum field theories in general spatial dimensions. In particular, primary fields are introduced as the fundamental objects of such theories and then studied in the formalism of radial quantization. The implications of conformal invariance on the functional form of correlation functions are studied in detail. Conformal blocks are defined and various approaches to their analytical and numerical calculation are presented with a special emphasis on the one-dimensional case. Building on these preliminaries, a modern formulation of the conformal bootstrap program and its various extensions are discussed. Examples are given in which bounds on the scaling dimensions in a one-dimensional theory are derived numerically. Using these results I motivate the technique of using the extremal functional bootstrap which I then develop in more detail. Many technical details are discussed and examples shown. After a brief discussion of conformal field theories with a boundary I apply numerical methods to find constraints on the spectrum of the 3D Ising model. Another application is presented in which I study the 4-point function on the boundary of a particular theory in Anti-de-Sitter space in order to approximate the mass spectrum of the theory.
We explain how the axioms of Conformal Field Theory are used to make predictions about critical exponents of continuous phase transitions in three dimensions, via a procedure called the conformal bootstrap. The method assumes conformal invariance of correlation functions, and imposes some relations between correlation functions of different orders. Numerical analysis shows that these conditions are incompatible unless the critical exponents take particular values, or more precisely that they must belong to a small island in the parameter space.