Celestial operator products from the worldsheet

TL;DR

This paper derives celestial operator product expansions for gluons and gravitons from ambitwistor string theory, revealing the structure of celestial CFT, its symmetries, and collinear splitting functions without approximations.

Contribution

It provides a worldsheet derivation of celestial OPEs, including infinite towers of descendants and symmetry algebras, for all helicities and configurations.

Findings

Reproduces known celestial OPE coefficients.

Derives infinite towers of SL(2,R) descendants.

Connects worldsheet OPEs to collinear splitting functions.

Abstract

We compute the operator product expansions of gluons and gravitons in celestial CFT from the worldsheet OPE of vertex operators of four-dimensional ambitwistor string theories. Remarkably, the worldsheet OPE localizes on the short-distance singularity between vertex operator insertions which in turn coincides with the OPE limit of operator insertions on the celestial sphere. The worldsheet CFT dynamically produces known celestial OPE coefficients -- as well as infinite towers of SL$(2,\mathbb{R})$ descendant contributions to the celestial OPE -- without any truncations or approximations. We obtain these results for all helicities and incoming/outgoing configurations. Furthermore, the worldsheet OPE encodes the infinite-dimensional symmetry algebras associated with the conformally soft sectors of gauge theory and gravity. We provide explicit operator realizations of the currents generating these symmetries on ambitwistor space in terms of vertex operators for soft gluons and gravitons, also computing their actions on hard particles of all helicities. Lastly, we show that the worldsheet OPE for momentum eigenstates produces the collinear splitting functions of gluons and gravitons.