Soft limits of Yang-Mills amplitudes and conformal correlators

By W. Fan, A. Fotopoulos, T. R. Taylor. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2019

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study tree-level celestial amplitudes in Yang-Mills theory — Mellin transforms of multi-gluon scattering amplitudes that convert them into the correlators of conformal primary fields on two-dimensional celestial sphere. By using purely field-theoretical methods, we show that the soft conformal limit of celestial amplitudes, in which one of the primary field operators associated to gauge bosons becomes a dimension one current, is dominated by the contributions of low-energy soft particles. This result confirms conclusions reached by using Yang-Mills theory formulated in curvilinear coordinates, as pioneered by Strominger. By using well-known collinear limits of Yang-Mills amplitudes, we derive the OPE rules for the primary fields and the holomorphic currents arising in the conformally soft limit. The Ward identities following from OPE have the same form as the identities derived by using soft theorems.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0279f5899fe9c0de2c00fd4026fbb76ed511f26

How researchers see this paper

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Sabrina Pasterski
2. M. Pate
3. L. Donnay
4. Andrew Strominger
5. A. Guevara
6. Andrea Puhm
7. Tim Adamo
8. E. Himwich

Citations in the corpus

• Celestial amplitudes and conformal soft theorems (2019, background): “between conformally soft wavefunctions and asymptotic symmetries [22, 24], although the origins of this connection seem more obscure.”
• Asymptotic symmetries and celestial CFT (2020, background): “This provoked reexamining scattering amplitudes in a basis [15–17] that makes conformal covariance manifest which, in turn, demanded a new understanding of the conformal analog of soft theorems [18–27].”
• Lectures on celestial amplitudes (2021, methodology): “4.3 Collinear limits as OPEs We have seen that by tuning the conformal dimensions of our operators we land on celestial currents which obey conformally soft factorization theorems.”
• Holographic symmetry algebras for gauge theory and gravity (2021, methodology): “This expression was derived from a Mellin transform of the known soft collinear gluon singularities in [38] and from symmetries in [44].”