In their recent paper [1] Alday, Gaiotto and Tachikawa proposed a relation between N = 2 fourdimensional supersymmetric gauge theories and two-dimensional conformal field theories. As part of their conjecture they gave an explicit combinatorial formula for the expansion of the conformal blocks inspired from the exact form of instanton part of the Nekrasov partition function. In this paper we study the origin of such an expansion from a CFT point of view. We consider the algebra A = Vir ⊗ H which is the tensor product of mutually commuting Virasoro and Heisenberg algebras and discover the special orthogonal basis of states in the highest weight representations of A. The matrix elements of primary fields in this basis have a very simple factorized form and coincide with the function called Z bif appearing in the instanton counting literature. Having such a simple basis, the problem of computation of the conformal blocks simplifies drastically and can be shown to lead to the expansion proposed in [1]. We found that this basis diagonalizes an infinite system of commuting Integrals of Motion related to Benjamin-Ono integrable hierarchy.

We study unitary conformal field theories with a unique stress tensor and at least one higher-spin conserved current in d > 3 dimensions. We prove that every such theory contains an infinite number of higher-spin conserved currents of arbitrarily high spin, and that Ward identities generated by the conserved charges of these currents imply that the correlators of the stress tensor and the conserved currents of the theory must coincide with one of the following three possibilities: a) a theory of n free bosons (for some integer n), b) a theory of n free fermions, or c) a theory of n d−2 2 -forms. For d even, all three structures exist, but for d odd, it may be the case that the third structure (c) does not; if it does exist, it is unclear what theory, if any, realizes it. This is a generalization of the result proved in three dimensions by Maldacena and Zhiboedov [1]. This paper supersedes the previous paper by the authors [2].