High Energy Theory Seminar

Celestial holography posits that the 4D S-matrix may be calculated holographically by a 2D conformal field theory. However, bulk translation invariance forces low-point massless celestial amplitudes to be distributional, which is an unusual property for a 2D CFT. In this talk, I show that translation-invariant MHV gluon amplitudes can be extracted from smooth 'leaf' amplitudes, where a bulk interaction vertex is integrated only over a hyperbolic slice of spacetime. After describing gluon leaf amplitudes' soft and collinear limits, I will show that MHV leaf amplitudes can be generated by a simple 2D system of free fermions and the semiclassical limit of Liouville theory, showing that translation-invariant, distributional amplitudes can be obtained from smooth correlation functions. An important step is showing that, in the semiclassical limit of Liouville theory, correlation functions of light operators are given by contact AdS Witten diagrams. This talk is based on a series of papers with Atul Sharma, Andrew Strominger, and Tianli Wang [2312.07820, 2402.04150,2403.18896]. 

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact theoryinfo@caltech.edu for Zoom information.