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Celestial Geometry

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-09-28 v1

Abstract

Celestial holography expresses S\mathcal{S}-matrix elements as correlators in a CFT living on the night sky. Poincar\'e invariance imposes additional selection rules on the allowed positions of operators. As a consequence, nn-point correlators are only supported on certain patches of the celestial sphere, depending on the labeling of each operator as incoming/outgoing. Here we initiate a study of the celestial geometry, examining the kinematic support of celestial amplitudes for different crossing channels. We give simple geometric rules for determining this support. For n5n\ge 5, we can view these channels as tiling together to form a covering of the celestial sphere. Our analysis serves as a stepping off point to better understand the analyticity of celestial correlators and illuminate the connection between the 4D kinematic and 2D CFT notions of crossing symmetry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.02505,
  title  = {Celestial Geometry},
  author = {Sebastian Mizera and Sabrina Pasterski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.02505},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

27 pages, 6 figures