Virasoro vacuum block at next-to-leading order in the heavy-light limit

Abstract

We consider the semiclassical limit of the vacuum Virasoro block describing the diagonal 4-point correlation functions on the sphere. At large central charge c, after exponentiation, it depends on two fixed ratios h_H/c and h_L/c, where h_{H, L} are the conformal dimensions of the 4-point function operators. The semiclassical block may be expanded in powers of the light ratio h_L/c and the leading non-trivial (linear) order is known in closed form as a function of h_H/c. Recently, this contribution has been matched against AdS_3 gravity calculations where heavy operators build up a classical geometry corresponding to a BTZ black hole, while the light operators are described by a geodesic in this background. Here, we compute for the first time the next-to-leading quadratic correction O((h_L/c)^{2}), again in closed form for generic heavy operator ratio h_H/c. The result is a highly non-trivial extension of the leading order and may be relevant for further refined AdS_{3}/CFT_{2} tests. Applications to the two-interval R\'enyi entropy are also presented.