The Schwarzian sector of higher spin CFTs

Abstract: Two-dimensional conformal field theories with Virasoro symmetry generically contain a Schwarzian sector. This sector is related to the near-horizon region of the near-extremal BTZ black hole in the holographic dual. In this work we generalize this picture to CFTs with higher spin conserved currents. It is shown that the partition function in the near-extremal limit agrees with that of BF higher spin gravity in AdS$_2$ which is described by a generalized Schwarzian theory. We also provide a spectral decomposition of Schwarzian partition functions via the $\mathcal{W}_N$ fusion kernel and consider supersymmetric generalizations.