Probability distributions for the stress tensor in conformal field theories

Understand

The vacuum state -- or any other state of finite energy -- is not an eigenstate of any smeared (averaged) local quantum field.

• The outcomes (spectral values) of repeated measurements of that averaged local quantum field are therefore distributed according to a non-trivial probability distribution.
• In this paper, we study probability distributions for the smeared stress tensor in two dimensional conformal quantum field theory.
• We first provide a new general method for this task based on the famous conformal welding problem in complex analysis.