How to stop worrying and love the bomb: light-ray operators in conformal field theories

What happens when a large amount of charge explodes? Where will all this charge go, and how will it get there? A way to answer these questions while doing minimal damage to university buildings is offered by light-ray operators: weighted integrals, along a null geodesic, of local QFT operators. In this talk, I will motivate this particular construction and argue for the relevance of light-ray operators to the study of conformal field theories. To study light-ray operators in more detail, I will then introduce an effective theory for highly charged CFT states. In the context of this theory, we can finally compute a two-point correlator, and discuss the effect of light-ray operators on the dynamics of an explosion.