IAS High Energy Theory Seminar
Celestial Operator Product Expansions and $w_{1+infinity}$ Symmetry for All Spins
This seminar will be presented in-person in Wolfensohn Hall at the IAS and on Zoom.
For contact-tracing purposes all off-campus attendees must register for this seminar:
REGISTRATION FORM
All in-person attendees must be fully vaccinated and masks are required in all indoor spaces (except while actively eating). Additionally, all off-campus attendees are required to upload proof of vaccination via the IAS CrowdPass App .
Abstract: The operator product expansion of massless celestial primary operators of arbitrary spin is investigated. Poincare symmetry is found to imply a set of recursion relations on the operator product expansion coefficients of the leading singular terms at tree-level in a holomorphic limit. The symmetry constraints are solved by an Euler beta function with arguments that depend simply on the right-moving conformal weights of the operators in the product. These symmetry-derived coefficients are shown not only to match precisely those arising from momentum-space tree-level collinear limits, but also to obey an infinite number of additional symmetry transformations that respect the algebra of $w_{1+infinity}$. In tree-level minimally-coupled gravitational theories, celestial currents are constructed from light transforms of conformally soft gravitons and found to generate the action of $w_{1+infinity}$ on arbitrary massless celestial primaries. Results include operator product expansion coefficients for fermions as well as those arising from higher-derivative non-minimal couplings of gluons and gravitons.