Bootstrapping the Three Dimensional Supersymmetric Ising Model.

We implement the conformal bootstrap program for three dimensional conformal field theories with N=2 supersymmetry and find universal constraints on the spectrum of operator dimensions in these theories. By studying the bounds on the dimension of the first scalar appearing in the operator product expansion of a chiral and an antichiral primary, we find a kink at the expected location of the critical three dimensional N=2 Wess-Zumino model, which can be thought of as a supersymmetric analog of the critical Ising model. Focusing on this kink, we determine, to high accuracy, the low-lying spectrum of operator dimensions of the theory, as well as the stress-tensor two-point function. We find that the latter is in an excellent agreement with an exact computation.

Conformal field theories in fractional dimensions.

We study the conformal bootstrap in fractional space-time dimensions, obtaining rigorous bounds on operator dimensions. Our results show strong evidence that there is a family of unitary conformal field theories connecting the 2D Ising model, the 3D Ising model, and the free scalar theory in 4D. We give numerical predictions for the leading operator dimensions and central charge in this family at different values of D and compare these to calculations of ϕ4 theory in the ϵ expansion.

Bootstrapping conformal field theories with the extremal functional method.

The existence of a positive linear functional acting on the space of (differences between) conformal blocks has been shown to rule out regions in the parameter space of conformal field theories (CFTs). We argue that at the boundary of the allowed region the extremal functional contains, in principle, enough information to determine the dimensions and operator product expansion (OPE) coefficients of an infinite number of operators appearing in the correlator under analysis. Based on this idea we develop the extremal functional method (EFM), a numerical procedure for deriving the spectrum and OPE coefficients of CFTs lying on the boundary (of solution space). We test the EFM by using it to rederive the low lying spectrum and OPE coefficients of the two-dimensional Ising model based solely on the dimension of a single scalar quasiprimary--no Virasoro algebra required. Our work serves as a benchmark for applications to more interesting, less known CFTs in the near future.