Multicollinear singularities in celestial CFT

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the holomorphic multicollinear limit of (celestial) amplitudes and use it to further investigate the double residue condition for (hard celestial) amplitudes and the celestial operator product expansion. We first set up the notion of holomorphic multicollinear limits of amplitudes and derive the 3-collinear splitting functions for Yang-Mills theory, Einstein gravity, and massless ϕ3 theory. In particular, we find that in ϕ3 theory the celestial 3-OPE contains a term with a branch cut. This explicit example confirms that branch cuts can obstruct the double residue condition for hard celestial amplitudes, which is the underlying cause of the celestial Jacobi identities not holding for certain theories. This addresses an ongoing debate in the literature about associativity of the celestial OPEs and concretely demonstrates a new (multi-particle) term in the celestial OPE coming from the multi-particle channel in the amplitudes.

Supersymmetry and the celestial Jacobi identity

“…The failure of the double residue condition on hard celestial amplitudes was traced to the presence of a branch cut in the multicollinear limit [8]. This motivated the authors to propose that the OPE in a generic tree-level EFT takes the form…”