A view of the bulk from the worldline

Abstract

A new method to compute correlation functions in AdS$_{d+1}$ in general dimension is introduced, considering a particle quantised in the worldline formalism of quantum field theory, coupled to bulk fields, in particular gravity, quantised in the standard manner. This gives a systematic two-parameter perturbative expansion organised by small parameters $G_N$ and the inverse mass of the particle, complementary to the usual Witten diagram expansion. This connects closely to CFT language, with the geodesic Witten diagram representation of global conformal blocks emerging naturally, and for two dimensions gives a bulk representation of the Virasoro block, with a systematic method for computing quantum corrections. The global conformal block and other contributions are shown to exponentiate in correlation functions in any dimension, corresponding to pieces of Witten diagrams at arbitrary loop order.