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A bstract 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.
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Chaos in celestial CFT
A bstract Celestial holography proposes a duality between gravitational scattering in asymptotically flat space-time and a conformal field theory living on the celestial sphere. Its dictionary relates the infinite dimensional space-time symmetry group to Ward identities of the CFT. The spontaneous breaking of these asymptotic symmetries governs the dynamics of the soft sector in the CFT. Here we show that this sector encodes non-trivial backreaction effects that exhibit characteristics of maximal quantum chaos. A key element in the derivation is the identification of the Hilbert space of celestial CFT, defined through radial quantization, with that of a constantly accelerating Rindler observer. From the point of view of the bulk, Rindler particles exhibit Lyapunov behavior due to shockwave interactions that shift the observer horizon. From the point of view of the boundary, the superrotation Goldstone modes affect the relevant representations of the celestial Virasoro symmetry in a manner that induces Lyapunov behavior of out-of-time-ordered celestial correlators.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1914860
- PAR ID:
- 10380988
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of High Energy Physics
- Volume:
- 2022
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 1029-8479
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2022)106
