A systematic approach to celestial holography: a case study in Einstein gravity

Abstract

We propose a systematic approach to celestial holography in massless theories beginning by studying the implications of properly incorporating field configurations built using the eigenstates of central interest: massless conformal primary wavefunctions that diagonalize the dilatation generator. Due to their singular behaviour on the locus $k\cdot x=0$, they do not belong to the space of Fourier decomposable functions, and incorporating them in the path integral domain requires careful manipulations. In this paper, we include these singular field configurations by a splitting procedure using large pure gauge/diffeomorphism transformations on the action functional. We demonstrate that doing so splits the action into an integrand supported on the singular locus $k\cdot x=0$ and an integrand on the rest of the space. Mellin transforms single out the scalings/conformal dimension in $x$, geometrically, we treat this as a proper non-compact scaling reduction, where we are able to further isolate the dynamics of the large pure diffeomorphism transformations. This takes the form of 2d chiral CFT on a 2d sphere on the singular locus $k\cdot x=0$ - the celestial sphere where the null cone of the origin cuts $\mathscr{I}$. Using this framework, we study Einstein gravity perturbatively around its self-dual sector, where the resulting microscopic 2d CFT couples to bulk scattering states. We are able to obtain an explicit representation of the $\mathcal{L} w_{1+\infty}$ algebra and leading soft splitting functions. With further marginal deformations, we also write down effective interaction vertices which provide form factors of tree-level graviton scattering in Minkowski space.