Virasoro blocks and quasimodular forms

Abstract

We analyse Virasoro conformal blocks in the regime of heavy intermediate exchange $(h_p \rightarrow \infty)$. For the 1-point block on the torus and the 4-point block on the sphere, we show that each order in the large-$h_p$ expansion can be written in closed form as polynomials in the Eisenstein series. The appearance of this structure is explained using the fusion kernel and, more markedly, by invoking the modular anomaly equations via the 2d/4d correspondence. We observe that the existence of these constraints allows us to develop a faster algorithm to recursively construct the blocks in this regime. We then apply our results to find corrections to averaged heavy-heavy-light OPE coefficients.