Celestial operator products from the worldsheet

Abstract

We compute the operator product expansions of gluons and gravitons in celestial CFT from the worldsheet OPE of vertex operators of four-dimensional ambitwistor string theories. Remarkably, the worldsheet OPE localizes on the short-distance singularity between vertex operator insertions which in turn coincides with the OPE limit of operator insertions on the celestial sphere. The worldsheet CFT dynamically produces known celestial OPE coefficients -- as well as infinite towers of SL$(2,\mathbb{R})$ descendant contributions to the celestial OPE -- without any truncations or approximations. We obtain these results for all helicities and incoming/outgoing configurations. Furthermore, the worldsheet OPE encodes the infinite-dimensional symmetry algebras associated with the conformally soft sectors of gauge theory and gravity. We provide explicit operator realizations of the currents generating these symmetries on ambitwistor space in terms of vertex operators for soft gluons and gravitons, also computing their actions on hard particles of all helicities. Lastly, we show that the worldsheet OPE for momentum eigenstates produces the collinear splitting functions of gluons and gravitons.

36 pages, no figures. v2: references added; v3: published version

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Bridging Carrollian and Celestial Holography
• Celestial holography meets twisted holography: 4d amplitudes from chiral correlators
• The SAGEX Review on Scattering Amplitudes, Chapter 11: Soft Theorems and Celestial Amplitudes
• Sub-subleading Soft Graviton Theorem from Asymptotic Einstein's Equations
• Celestial $w_{1+\infty }$ Symmetries from Twistor Space
• Black Holes in Klein Space
• Four-point correlators of light-ray operators in CCFT
• All-order celestial OPE in the MHV sector
• Quantizing the non-linear graviton
• Towards higher-spin holography in flat space
• Celestial amplitudes in an ambidextrous basis
• The 4d/2d correspondence in twistor space and holomorphic Wilson lines
• Supersymmetric celestial OPEs and soft algebras from the ambitwistor string worldsheet
• Celestial $w_{1+\infty }$ charges and the subleading structure of asymptotically-flat spacetimes
• All-order celestial OPE from on-shell recursion
• Integrable Field Theories and Their CCFT Duals
• Celestial Mellin Amplitude
• Currents in Celestial CFT
• Asymptotic Higher Spin Symmetries II: Noether Realization in Gravity
• Celestial Holography
• Asymptotic Higher Spin Symmetries IV: Einstein-Yang-Mills Theory
• A Celestial Description of Planar Super-Yang-Mills Theory