Wednesday 29 July 2015

Toric Virasoro conformal blocks

This is a commentary of a recent article by Nikita Nemkov, based on the report I wrote for the journal JHEP. I am making this text public because it might be useful to the community, but is kept confidential by the journal (as is unfortunately common practice). This blog post omits the parts of the report that deal with technical details and suggested improvements. Only the general commentary is reproduced, in a slightly modified form. Making it public implies renouncing anonymity. But I had already renounced anonymity by engaging in private correspondence with the author while studying his article. This made the process easier and more efficient, and I am grateful to Nikita Nemkov for his prompt and detailed answers. As a result, the article underwent very important improvements between Arxiv's second version and the JHEP version. I had never seen an author make such extensive improvements following a referee's suggestions.