Speaker
Description
Thermal correlation functions provide a powerful window into the heavy sector of conformal field theories, complementing the information accessible through conventional bootstrap techniques. In this talk I will review recent progress on the thermal bootstrap, focusing on the extraction of spectral densities and heavy-heavy-light OPE coefficients from thermal one-point functions. After introducing thermal conformal blocks and their computation through Casimir equations, I will describe an emerging integrability framework that unifies these constructions and extends to more general conformal blocks. I will then explain how thermal inversion formulas lead to remarkably precise asymptotic predictions for heavy CFT data, which remain accurate well beyond the asymptotic regime. Applications include gapped CFTs whose high-temperature behavior is well captured by a thermal effective action, as well as CFTs dual to weakly coupled scalar field theories in AdS.