Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Liouville field theory
Summary
In physics, Liouville field theory (or simply Liouville theory) is a two-dimensional conformal field theory whose classical equation of motion is a generalization of Liouville's equation.
Liouville theory is defined for all complex values of the central charge of its Virasoro symmetry algebra, but it is unitary only if
and its classical limit is
Although it is an interacting theory with a continuous spectrum, Liouville theory has been solved. In particular, its three-point function on the sphere has been determined analytically.
Liouville theory describes the dynamics of a field called the Liouville field, which is defined on a two-dimensional space. This field is not a free field due to the presence of an exponential potential
where the parameter is called the coupling constant. In a free field theory, the energy eigenvectors are linearly independent, and the momentum is conserved in interactions. In Liouville theory, momentum is not conserved.
Moreover, the potential reflects the energy eigenvectors before they reach , and two eigenvectors are linearly dependent if their momenta are related by the reflection
where the background charge is
While the exponential potential breaks momentum conservation, it does not break conformal symmetry, and Liouville theory is a conformal field theory with the central charge
Under conformal transformations, an energy eigenvector with momentum transforms as a primary field with the conformal dimension by
The central charge and conformal dimensions are invariant under the duality
The correlation functions of Liouville theory are covariant under this duality, and under reflections of the momenta. These quantum symmetries of Liouville theory are however not manifest in the Lagrangian formulation, in particular the exponential potential is not invariant under the duality.
The spectrum of Liouville theory is a diagonal combination of Verma modules of the Virasoro algebra,
where and denote the same Verma module, viewed as a representation of the left- and right-moving Virasoro algebra respectively.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.