A hidden 2d CFT for self-dual Yang-Mills on the celestial sphere

Abstract

Abstract Self-dual Yang-Mills theory admits an underlying infinite dimensional symmetry algebra, which has been obtained from mode expansion of Mellin transformed 4d scattering amplitudes and separately, Koszul duality on twistor space. In this paper, we propose to derive an explicit 2d realization of the algebra by performing a particular gauge transformation on the twistor action for self-dual Yang-Mills. The gauge parameter used in the transformation generates pure gauge connections corresponding to large gauge transformations on 4d Minkowski space, which localises part of the twistor action to a ℂℙ1 on ℂ* reduction of twistor space. Under a projection, it can be mapped to the celestial sphere at the light-cone cut of the origin on $$ \mathcal{I} $$ I . Geometrically, this is the common boundary celestial sphere shared by Euclidean AdS3 or Lorentzian dS3 slices of Minkowski space. We comment on the geometric meaning of the derivation from the perspective of minitwistor spaces of the 3d slices embedded in 4d Minkowski space. Using the action functional of this 2d CFT, we compute its stress-energy tensor and central charge. By a further marginal deformation, we calculate correlation functions of current algebra generators purely from the 2d side which reproduce full 4d tree-level form factors.