English

Extended BMS Algebra of Celestial CFT

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-04-22 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We elaborate on the proposal of flat holography in which four-dimensional physics is encoded in two-dimensional celestial conformal field theory (CCFT). The symmetry underlying CCFT is the extended BMS symmetry of (asymptotically) flat spacetime. We use soft and collinear theorems of Einstein-Yang-Mills theory to derive the OPEs of BMS field operators generating superrotations and supertranslations. The energy-momentum tensor, given by a shadow transform of a soft graviton operator, implements superrotations in the Virasoro subalgebra of bms4\mathfrak{bms_4}. Supertranslations can be obtained from a single translation generator along the light-cone direction by commuting it with the energy-momentum tensor. This operator also originates from a soft graviton and generates a flow of conformal dimensions. All supertranslations can be assembled into a single primary conformal field operator on celestial sphere.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.10973,
  title  = {Extended BMS Algebra of Celestial CFT},
  author = {Angelos Fotopoulos and Stephan Stieberger and Tomasz R. Taylor and Bin Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.10973},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

25 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:54:53.439Z