Conformal bootstrap in Liouville Theory

Abstract

The conformal bootstrap hypothesis is a powerful idea in theoretical physics which has led to spectacular predictions in the context of critical phenomena. It postulates an explicit expression for the correlation functions of a conformal field theory in terms of its 3-point correlation functions. In this paper we give the first mathematical proof of the conformal bootstrap hypothesis in the context of Liouville theory, a 2-dimensional conformal field theory studied since the eighties in theoretical physics and constructed recently by F. David and the three last authors using probability theory. The proof is based on a probabilistic construction of the Virasoro algebra highest weight modules through spectral analysis of an associated self adjoint operator akin to harmonic analysis on non compact Lie groups but in an infinite dimensional setup.