Thermal one-point functions and their partial wave decomposition

Abstract

In this work we address partial wave decompositions of thermal one-point functions in conformal field theories on S¹ × S^d−1. With the help of Casimir differential equations we develop efficient algorithms to compute the relevant conformal blocks for an external field of arbitrary spin and with any spin exchange along the thermal circle, at least in three dimensions. This is achieved by identifying solutions to the Casimir equations with a special class of spherical functions in the harmonic analysis of the conformal group. The resulting blocks are then applied to study the decomposition of one-point functions of the scalar ϕ² and the stress tensor T for a three-dimensional free scalar field ϕ. We are able to read off averaged OPE coefficients into exchanged fields of high weight and spin for a complete set of tensor structures. We also extract an asymptotic behaviour of conformal blocks and use it to analyse the density of heavy-heavy-light OPE coefficients for spinning operators, comparing it with semi-classical predictions, such as the dimensions of operators at large charge.