New Recipes for Brownian Loop Soups

Valentino F. Foit, Matthew Kleban

Published 2020-07-03Version 1

We define a large new class of conformal primary operators in the ensemble of Brownian loops in two dimensions known as the ``Brownian loop soup,'' and compute their correlation functions analytically and in closed form. The loop soup is a conformally invariant statistical ensemble with central charge $c = 2 \lambda$, where $\lambda > 0$ is the intensity of the soup. Previous work identified exponentials of the layering operator $e^{i \beta N(z)}$ as primary operators. Each Brownian loop was assigned $\pm 1$ randomly, and $N(z)$ was defined to be the sum of these numbers over all loops that encircle the point $z$. These exponential operators then have conformal dimension ${\frac{\lambda}{10}}(1 - \cos \beta)$. Here we generalize this procedure by assigning a more general random value to each loop. The operator $e^{i \beta N(z)}$ remains primary with conformal dimension $\frac {\lambda}{10}(1 - \phi(\beta))$, where $\phi(\beta)$ is the characteristic function of the probability distribution used to assign random values to each loop. Using recent results we compute in closed form the exact two-point functions in the upper half-plane and four-point functions in the full plane of this very general class of operators. These correlation functions depend analytically on the parameters $\lambda, \beta_i, z_i$, and on the characteristic function $\phi(\beta)$. They satisfy the conformal Ward identities and are crossing symmetric. As in previous work, the conformal block expansion of the four-point function reveals the existence of additional and as-yet uncharacterized conformal primary operators.