Elements of celestial conformal field theory

Abstract

Abstract In celestial holography, four-dimensional scattering amplitudes are considered as two-dimensional conformal correlators of a putative two-dimensional celestial conformal field theory (CCFT). The simplest way of converting momentum space amplitudes into CCFT correlators is by taking their Mellin transforms with respect to light-cone energies. For massless particles, like gluons, however, such a construction leads to three-point and four-point correlators that vanish everywhere except for a measure zero hypersurface of celestial coordinates. This is due to the four-dimensional momentum conservation law that constrains the insertion points of the operators associated with massless particles. These correlators are reminiscent of Coulomb gas correlators that, in the absence of background charges, vanish due to charge conservation. We supply the background momentum by coupling Yang-Mills theory to a background dilaton field, with the (complex) dilaton source localized on the celestial sphere. This picture emerges from the physical interpretation of the solutions of the system of differential equations discovered by Banerjee and Ghosh. We show that the solutions can be written as Mellin transforms of the amplitudes evaluated in such a dilaton background. The resultant three-gluon and four-gluon amplitudes are single-valued functions of celestial coordinates enjoying crossing symmetry and all other properties expected from standard CFT correlators. We use them to extract OPEs and compare them with the OPEs extracted from multi-gluon celestial amplitudes without a dilaton background. We perform the conformal block decomposition of the four-gluon single-valued correlator and determine the dimensions, spin and group representations of the entire primary field spectrum of the Yang-Mills sector of CCFT.