Asymptotic symmetries and celestial CFT

By L. Donnay, Sabrina Pasterski, Andrea Puhm. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2020

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We provide a unified treatment of conformally soft Goldstone modes which arise when spin-one or spin-two conformal primary wavefunctions become pure gauge for certain integer values of the conformal dimension ∆. This effort lands us at the crossroads of two ongoing debates about what the appropriate conformal basis for celestial CFT is and what the asymptotic symmetry group of Einstein gravity at null infinity should be. Finite energy wavefunctions are captured by the principal continuous series ∆ ∈ 1 + iℝ and form a complete basis. We show that conformal primaries with analytically continued conformal dimension can be understood as certain contour integrals on the principal series. This clarifies how conformally soft Goldstone modes fit in but do not augment this basis. Conformally soft gravitons of dimension two and zero which are related by a shadow transform are shown to generate superrotations and non-meromorphic diffeomorphisms of the celestial sphere which we refer to as shadow superrotations. This dovetails the Virasoro and Diff(S2) asymptotic symmetry proposals and puts on equal footing the discussion of their associated soft charges, which correspond to the stress tensor and its shadow in the two-dimensional celestial CFT.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/353813ea58728371112470e6da31c3405b76dd17

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Citations in the corpus

Holographic symmetry algebras for gauge theory and gravity (2021, background): “This tower is likely not yet the complete celestial symmetry algebra, which may also include Goldstone currents [14,22,32,60] and negative helicity gluon and graviton generators or their shadows.”
Celestial Holography (2021, background): “Nevertheless, it has proven judicious to analytically continue ∆ over the complex plane [107] in order to incorporate both the action of translations which shift ∆ → ∆ + 1 [108–110], as well as soft theorems which involve operators with (half)-integer dimensions [106, 108, 111–116].”
Bridging Carrollian and celestial holography (2022, background): “Notice that the operators O (s) ∆,α(w, w̄) and a (s) ∆,α(w, w̄) are proportional to each other [93,119] (see also [123] for more details).”