The light-ray OPE and conformal colliders

TL;DR

This paper develops a nonperturbative operator product expansion for null-integrated operators in conformal field theories, with applications to collider event shapes and energy correlators, validated by known results and new predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a convergent light-ray OPE framework using celestial blocks, enabling nonperturbative analysis of collider observables in CFTs.

Findings

Agreement with previous weak and strong coupling results

New predictions at four-loop order in N=4 SYM

Application to energy-energy correlators in collider physics

Abstract

We derive a nonperturbative, convergent operator product expansion (OPE) for null-integrated operators on the same null plane in a CFT. The objects appearing in the expansion are light-ray operators, whose matrix elements can be computed by the generalized Lorentzian inversion formula. For example, a product of average null energy (ANEC) operators has an expansion in the light-ray operators that appear in the stress-tensor OPE. An important application is to collider event shapes. The light-ray OPE gives a nonperturbative expansion for event shapes in special functions that we call celestial blocks. As an example, we apply the celestial block expansion to energy-energy correlators in N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory. Using known OPE data, we find perfect agreement with previous results both at weak and strong coupling, and make new predictions at weak coupling through 4 loops (NNNLO).

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