Revisiting Schrödinger CFTs: Factorization, Massless Particles, and a Path to the Bootstrap

Abstract

We revisit Schrödinger CFTs from a modern point of view. We introduce the ''harmonic trap geometry,'' analogous to the cylinder picture in relativistic CFTs, and demonstrate a state-operator correspondence that applies to all operators, including descendant, massless, and ''normal-ordered operators.'' A thermofield double construction plays an extremely important role. We systematically classify all physical spectra in the harmonic trap and their unitarity bounds, extending earlier results to include both massless and massive states of all spins, providing a new analytic treatment of unitarity bounds, and establishing foundations for a bootstrap. In our reformulation, previously known perturbative non-renormalization theorems follow immediately from non-perturbative factorization at fixed points and along RG flows. Massless states are described by an effective 1d CFT, as predicted by DLCQ, and violate the non-renormalization theorems. We include a self-consistent review of Schrödinger CFTs in our framework, making the paper accessible to anyone with a field theory background.