Semiclassical methods in conformal field theories scrutinized by the epsilon-expansion

Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) are crucial for our understanding of Quantum Field Theory (QFT). Because of their powerful symmetry properties, they play the role of signposts in the space of QFTs. Any method that gives us information about their structure, and lets us compute their observables, is therefore of great interest. In this thesis we explore the large quantum number sector of CFTs, by describing a semiclassical expansion approach. The idea is to describe the theory in terms of fluctuations around a classical background, which corresponds to a superfluid state of finite charge density. We detail the implementation of the method in the case of U (1)-invariant lagrangian CFTs defined in the epsilon-expansion. After introducing the method for generic correlators, we illustrate it by performing the computation of several observables. First, we compute the scaling dimension of the lowest operator having a given large charge n under the U (1) symmetry. We demonstrate how the semiclassical result in this case bridges the gap between the naive diagrammatic computation (which fails at too large n) and the general large-charge expansion of CFTs (which is only valid for n large enough). Second, we apply the method to the computation of 3- and 4-point functions involving the same operator. This lets us derive some of the OPE (Operator Product Expansion) coefficients. Finally, we consider the rest of the spectrum of charge-n operators, and propose a way to classify them by studying their free-theory equivalent. In the free theory, we construct the complete set of primary operators with number of derivatives bounded by the charge. We also find a mapping between the excited states of the superfluid and the vacuum states of standard quantization, which is valid when the spin of said states is bounded by the square root of the charge.