A Celestial Description of Planar Super-Yang-Mills Theory

Abstract

We extend the celestial Roiban-Spradlin-Volovich-Witten (RSVW) formalism developed in our previous work to minitwistor superspace. Using the Drummond-Henn formula for all tree-level amplitudes in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory, we construct tree-level N^k-MHV celestial leaf amplitudes and show that their minitwistor-Fourier transforms are given by integrals over moduli spaces of families of minitwistor lines. We also adapt the Korchemsky-Sokatchev twistor-transform techniques for gluon amplitudes to the minitwistor-Fourier transforms of leaf amplitudes. We then describe two dynamical formulations of these celestial amplitudes. First, we show that semiclassical correlators of Wilson operators supported on algebraic cycles in minitwistor superspace act as generating functionals for tree-level N^k-MHV leaf-gluon amplitudes. Second, we analyse a semiclassical minitwistor sigma model, identify its vertex operators, and construct from them celestial gluon operators that close on the S-algebra in the semiclassical approximation; their leading-trace semiclassical correlators again reproduce the tree-level N^k-MHV leaf amplitudes. A companion paper extends this construction beyond tree level, in particular to one-loop amplitudes via a celestial version of the Brandhuber-Spence-Travaglini formalism.

144 pages

References in corpus (8)

• Gluon scattering amplitudes at strong coupling
• MHV Amplitudes in N=4 Super Yang-Mills and Wilson Loops
• The Complete Planar S-matrix of N=4 SYM as a Wilson Loop in Twistor Space
• Scattering Amplitudes, Wilson Loops and the String/Gauge Theory Correspondence
• All tree-level amplitudes in N=4 SYM
• From Twistor Actions to MHV Diagrams
• MHV Diagrams in Momentum Twistor Space
• Spectral representation in Klein space: simplifying celestial leaf amplitudes