Title: Conformal blocks from higher-point holography

Speaker: Dr. Sarthak Parikh, Caltech, USA

Abstract: Conformal blocks are theory-independent basic building blocks of local observables in conformal field theories (CFTs). Higher-point conformal blocks play an important role in the study of CFTs and in the context of holography. Thus they are important objects to study. Until recently, knowledge of higher-point blocks was restricted to an extremely limited set of examples. In this talk I will present a simple set of "Feynman rules" for constructing all possible higher-point conformal blocks (involving external and exchanged scalars operators). These rules furnish explicit power-series expansions of blocks in powers of conformal cross-ratios. I will describe how to obtain this result via holography using position- and Mellin-space methods as well as crucial input from a discrete variant of holography.