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Partial Differential Equations for MHV Celestial Amplitudes in Liouville Theory

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-05-14 v3

Abstract

In this note, we continue our study of Liouville theory and celestial amplitudes by deriving a set of partial differential equations governing the nn-point MHV celestial amplitudes for gluons and gravitons, parametrised by the Liouville coupling constant bb. These equations provide a systematic framework for computing the perturbative expansion in bb of the celestial amplitudes, which are known to reproduce the tree-level MHV nn-point functions for pure Yang-Mills and Einstein gravity in the semiclassical b0b\rightarrow0 limit. We demonstrate that the O(b2)\mathcal{O}(b^{2}) corrections are logarithmic for both gluons and gravitons. Furthermore, we compute the correction to the celestial operator product expansion (OPE) parametrised by b2b^{2}. In the case of gluons, the resulting deformation of the celestial OPE is shown to be isomorphic to the one-loop correction of the celestial OPE in pure Yang-Mills theory. We then propose that "celestial Liouville theory," extended beyond the semiclassical limit, encodes the one-loop regime of pure Yang-Mills theory. A formally analogous computation is performed for Einstein gravity to ascertain the deformation of the celestial OPE induced by a non-zero Liouville coupling constant. However, as we shall explain, the physical interpretation of this result remains an open problem due to the intricate nature of the loop-corrected holomorphic collinear limit in graviton scattering amplitudes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.05936,
  title  = {Partial Differential Equations for MHV Celestial Amplitudes in Liouville Theory},
  author = {Igor Mol},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.05936},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

It has been a pleasure to update the manuscript in order to incorporate the many constructive remarks of the referee, which have helped to considerably improve the work. We rectified the map between celestial and Liouville conformal weights, corrected and simplified the derivation of the PDEs for gluonic and gravitational celestial amplitudes, and corrected several typographical errors