Classical conformal blocks and isomonodromic deformations

Abstract

The leading classical asymptotics of Virasoro conformal blocks on the Riemann sphere with n generic and n-3 "heavy" degenerate field insertions can be described in terms of the geometry of Garnier system describing the monodromy preserving deformations of second order Fuchsian differential equations on an n-punctured sphere. This allows us to characterise the leading classical asymptotics of Virasoro conformal blocks completely, and to clarify in which sense conformal field theory represents a quantisation of the isomonodromic deformation problem.