Rényi entropies, the analytic bootstrap, and 3D quantum gravity at higher genus

Abstract

Abstract: We compute the contribution of the vacuum Virasoro representation to the genus-two partition function of an arbitrary CFT with central charge c > 1. This is the perturbative pure gravity partition function in three dimensions. We employ a sewing construction, in which the partition function is expressed as a sum of sphere four-point functions of Virasoro vacuum descendants. For this purpose, we develop techniques to efficiently compute correlation functions of holomorphic operators, which by crossing sym-metry are determined exactly by a finite number of OPE coefficients; this is an analytic implementation of the conformal bootstrap. Expanding the results in 1/c, corresponding to the semiclassical bulk gravity expansion, we find that — unlike at genus one — the result does not truncate at finite loop order. Our results also allow us to extend earlier work on multiple-interval Rényi entropies and on the partition function in the separating degeneration limit.