English

The Sky Remembers everything: Celestial amplitude, Shadow and OPE in quadratic EFT of gravity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-08-18 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

In this paper, we compute the celestial amplitude arising from higher curvature corrections to Einstein gravity, incorporating phase dressing. The inclusion of such corrections leads to effective modifications of the theory's ultraviolet (UV) behaviour. In the eikonal limit, we find that, in contrast to Einstein's gravity, where the uu and ss-channel contributions cancel, these contributions remain non-vanishing in the presence of higher curvature terms. We examine the analytic structure of the resulting amplitude and derive a dispersion relation for the phase-dressed eikonal amplitude in quadratic gravity. Furthermore, we investigate the celestial conformal block expansion of the Mellin-transformed conformal shadow amplitude within the framework of celestial conformal field theory (CCFT). As a consequence, we compute the corresponding operator product expansion (OPE) coefficients using the Burchnall-Chaundy expansion. In addition, we evaluate the OPE via the Euclidean OPE inversion formula across various kinematic channels and comment on its applicability and implications. Finally, we briefly explore the Carrollian amplitude associated with the corresponding quadratic EFT.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.02899,
  title  = {The Sky Remembers everything: Celestial amplitude, Shadow and OPE in quadratic EFT of gravity},
  author = {Arpan Bhattacharyya and Saptaswa Ghosh and Sounak Pal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.02899},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

41 Pages, 5 Figures, Presentation improved, Main conclusions unchanged, Accepted in SciPost Physics for publication