Analytic Functional Bootstrap for CFTs in $d>1$

Abstract

We introduce analytic functionals which act on the crossing equation for CFTs in arbitrary spacetime dimension. The functionals fully probe the constraints of crossing symmetry on the first sheet, and are in particular sensitive to the OPE, (double) lightcone and Regge limits. Compatibility with the crossing equation imposes constraints on the functional kernels which we study in detail. We then introduce two simple classes of functionals. The first class has a simple action on generalized free fields and their deformations and can be used to bootstrap AdS contact interactions in general dimension. The second class is obtained by tensoring holomorphic and antiholomorphic copies of $d=1$ functionals which have been considered recently. They are dual to simple solutions to crossing in $d=2$ which include the energy correlator of the Ising model. We show how these functionals lead to optimal bounds on the OPE density of $d=2$ CFTs and argue that they provide an equivalent rewriting of the $d=2$ crossing equation which is better suited for numeric computations than current approaches.