Missing Corner in the Sky: Massless Three-Point Celestial Amplitudes

TL;DR

This paper computes the first non-zero three-point celestial amplitudes for massless particles in Minkowski space, revealing their conformal field theory structure and connection to soft theorems and conserved currents.

Contribution

It provides the first explicit calculation of three-point celestial amplitudes for massless particles, demonstrating their conformal correlator form and relation to soft theorems.

Findings

Three-point celestial amplitudes are non-zero due to soft and colinear support.

Amplitudes take the form of 2D conformal correlators.

Gluon and graviton amplitudes relate to conserved currents and supertranslations.

Abstract

We present the first computation of three-point celestial amplitudes in Minkowski space of massless scalars, photons, gluons, and gravitons. Such amplitudes were previously considered to be zero in the literature because the corresponding scattering amplitudes in the plane wave basis vanish for finite momenta due to momentum conservation. However, the delta function for the momentum conservation has support in the soft and colinear regions, and contributes to the Mellin and shadow integrals that give non-zero celestial amplitudes. We further show that when expanding in the (shadow) conformal basis for the incoming (outgoing) particle wave functions, the amplitudes take the standard form of correlators in two-dimensional conformal field theory. In particular, the three-point celestial gluon amplitudes take the form of a three-point function of a spin-one current with two spin-one primary operators, which strongly supports the relation between soft spinning particles and conserved currents. Moreover, the three-point celestial amplitudes of one graviton and two massless scalars take the form of a correlation function involving a primary operator of conformal weight one and spin two, whose level-one descendent is the supertranslation current.