Thermal conformal blocks

Abstract

We study conformal blocks for thermal one-point-functions on the sphere in conformal field theories of general dimension. These thermal conformal blocks satisfy second-order Casimir differential equations and have integral representations related to AdS Witten diagrams. We give an analytic formula for the scalar conformal block in terms of generalized hypergeometric functions. As an application, we deduce an asymptotic formula for the three-point coefficients of primary operators in the limit where two of the operators are heavy.