English

Marginality from Leading Soft Gluons

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-07-22 v2

Abstract

Marginal operators in a d-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT), those with conformal dimension Δ=d\Delta=d, give us information about the space of related theories. This can be incredibly useful when trying to develop an intrinsic definition of a holographic CFT. Recent work has established that in the case of celestial CFTs, those dual to asymptotically flat spacetimes, marginal operators can be constructed as shadow transforms of soft scalars. In this work, rather than starting from a bulk theory of scalars, we start with Yang-Mills and construct marginal operators from soft gluons via light transforms. We obtain the local metric and connections for the associated conformal manifold by studying the two- and three-point functions of these marginal operators. We then discuss the implications of this for broadening our understanding of operator product expansions of soft operators in celestial CFTs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.12521,
  title  = {Marginality from Leading Soft Gluons},
  author = {Sruthi A. Narayanan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.12521},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, 2 appendices. Version two has erroneous transformations removed and is accepted for publication in JHEP

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:44:23.492Z