Spinning geodesic Witten diagrams

Abstract

Abstract We present an expression for the four-point conformal blocks of symmetric traceless operators of arbitrary spin as an integral over a pair of geodesics in Anti-de Sitter space, generalizing the geodesic Witten diagram formalism of Hijano et al. [1] to arbitrary spin. As an intermediate step in the derivation, we identify a convenient basis of bulk threepoint interaction vertices which give rise to all possible boundary three point structures. We highlight a direct connection between the representation of the conformal block as geodesic Witten diagram and the shadow operator formalism.