Carrollian Amplitudes and Celestial Symmetries

Abstract

Carrollian holography aims to express gravity in four-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetime in terms of a dual three-dimensional Carrollian CFT living at null infinity. Carrollian amplitudes are massless scattering amplitudes written in terms of asymptotic or null data at $\mathcal{I}$. These position space amplitudes at $\mathcal{I}$ are to be re-interpreted as correlation functions in the putative dual Carrollian CFT. We derive basic results concerning tree-level Carrollian amplitudes yielding dynamical constraints on the holographic dual. We obtain surprisingly compact expressions for $n$-point MHV gluon and graviton amplitudes in position space at $\mathcal{I}$. We discuss the UV/IR behaviours of Carrollian amplitudes and investigate their collinear limit, which allows us to define a notion of Carrollian OPE. By smearing the OPE along the generators of null infinity, we obtain the action of the celestial symmetries - namely, the $S$ algebra for Yang-Mills theory and $L{w}_{1+\infty }$ for gravity - on the Carrollian operators. As a consistency check, we systematically relate our results with celestial amplitudes using the link between the two approaches. Finally, we initiate a direct connection between twistor space and Carrollian amplitudes.

59 pages, 1 figure