On the local conformal structure of Imaginary Liouville theory

Abstract

Imaginary Liouville theory was recently proposed as a path integral construction of a non-rational conformal field theory (CFT) with central charge less than one (Usciati et al. 2026). In the present work, we establish Ward identities and Belavin-Polyakov-Zamolodchikov differential equations in this framework, assuming a precise conjecture on the decay of the Laplace transform of Imaginary Gaussian multiplicative chaos. These results provide a first step towards a rigorous implementation of the conformal bootstrap program for conformal field theories with central charge lower than one. This work is the first to investigate the intrinsic properties of Imaginary Liouville theory beyond exact computations.