Celestial chiral algebras, colour-kinematics duality and integrability

Abstract

Abstract We study celestial chiral algebras appearing in celestial holography, using the light-cone gauge formulation of self-dual Yang-Mills theory and self-dual gravity, and explore also a deformation of the latter. The recently discussed w1+∞ algebra in self-dual gravity arises from the soft expansion of an area-preserving diffeomorphism algebra, which plays the role of the kinematic algebra in the colour-kinematics duality and the double copy relation between the self-dual theories. The W1+∞ deformation of w1+∞ arises from a Moyal deformation of self-dual gravity. This theory is interpreted as a constrained chiral higher-spin gravity, where the field is a tower of higher-spin components fully constrained by the graviton component. In all these theories, the chiral structure of the operator-product expansion exhibits the colour-kinematics duality: the implicit ‘left algebra’ is the self-dual kinematic algebra, while the ‘right algebra’ provides the structure constants of the operator-product expansion, ensuring its associativity at tree level. In a scattering amplitudes version of the Ward conjecture, the left algebra ensures the classical integrability of this type of theories. In particular, it enforces the vanishing of the tree-level amplitudes via the double copy.