Notes on crossing transformations of Virasoro conformal blocks

Abstract

We carefully bootstrap the crossing kernels of Virasoro conformal blocks from first principles. Our approach emphasizes the Hilbert space structure of the space of Virasoro conformal blocks which makes the consistency of crossing transformations obvious. We give a pedagogical explanation of the necessary background about Virasoro conformal blocks and special functions. We also explain several applications and prove new results about the crossing kernels.