Semiclassical Canovaccio for Composite Operators

Abstract

We present a novel semiclassical framework tailored to determine the scaling dimensions of heavy neutral composite operators in conformal field theories (CFTs) which are inaccessible with other current methodologies. It utilizes the state-operator correspondence to map the desired scaling dimensions to the semiclassical energy spectrum of periodic homogeneous field configurations on a cylinder. As concrete applications, we provide detailed analyses for the $\phi^4$ theory near four dimensions and $\phi^6$ near three dimensions, semiclassically determining the full spectrum of neutral operators in the traceless symmetric Lorentz representations. Our methodology is presented pedagogically and is readily applicable to a vast class of CFTs.