Loops on the Celestial Sphere

Abstract

We study the effect of loop corrections to conformal correlators on the celestial sphere at null infinity. We first analyze finite one-loop celestial amplitudes in pure Yang-Mills theory and Einstein gravity. We then turn to our main focus: infrared divergent loop amplitudes in planar $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. We compute the celestial one-loop amplitude in dimensional regularization and show that it can be recast as an operator acting on the celestial tree-level amplitude. This extends to any loop order and the re-summation of all planar loops enables us to write down an expression for the all-loop celestial amplitude. Finally, we show that the exponentiated all-loop expression given by the BDS formula gets promoted on the celestial sphere to an operator acting on the tree-level conformal correlation function, thus yielding, the celestial BDS formula.

18 pages. Version 2: typos corrected, comments added