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5 - Introduction to Liouville Conformal Field Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2025

Nathanaël Berestycki
Affiliation:
Universität Wien, Austria
Ellen Powell
Affiliation:
Durham University
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Summary

This chapter provides an introduction to Liouville conformal field theory on the sphere, as developed in a series of papers starting with the work of David, Kupiainen, Rhodes and Vargas. We give an informal overview of conformal field theory in general and Polyakov’s action, before starting our rigorous presentation. For this, we first spend some time defining Gaussian free fields on general manifolds, and explaining how to construct their associated Gaussian multiplicative chaos measures via uniformisation. We then show how to construct the correlation functions of the theory under certain constraints known as the Seiberg bounds. One remarkable feature of the theory is its integrability: we demonstrate this phenomenon by expressing the k-point correlation functions as negative fractional moments of Gaussian multiplicative chaos. We conclude with a brief overview of some recent developments, including a short discussion of BPZ equations, conformal bootstrap and the proof by Kupiainen, Rhodes and Vargas of the celebrated DOZZ formula.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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