arXiv subjects

Reiko Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Reiko Liu.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Shadow Completion in Celestial OPEs

We argue that celestial OPEs must be supplemented by shadow-basis operators. Although the shadow transform does not introduce new bulk degrees of freedom, it provides a distinct primary state in the boundary celestial theory. From OPE consistency, we show that the ordinary celestial OPE does not close on Mellin-basis exchanges alone. Rather, the same exchanged bulk particle must also appear through its shadow-basis representative. This leads to a shadow-completed OPE, with the shadow OPE coefficient fixed by the ordinary collinear coefficient through the universal shadow factor. We discuss the corresponding boundary Hilbert-space interpretation, extend this argument to gluons and gravitons, and verify the shadow exchange directly in tree-level regular celestial amplitudes, including a scalar $2\rightarrow n$ analysis and an explicit five-point example.

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arXiv2026

Carrollian holography with agentic AI: Real mass is imaginary

We introduce LACIA, a verification-driven agentic AI workflow for theoretical physics, and apply it with independent human checks to construct Carrollian conformal bases. We develop the Poincare-Carrollian intertwiner as the central method. It reproduces the celestial and Carrollian conformal bases for massless particles and constructs the missing Carrollian bases for massive and tachyonic particles. The massive basis requires a complex momentum shift in scattering amplitudes.

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arXiv2026

Unifying soft and hard dynamics: The hard current algebra in celestial holography

Soft current algebras capture the infrared structure of scattering in asymptotically flat spacetimes, but an analogous algebraic description of finite-energy dynamics has been missing. We uncover an infinite-dimensional hard current algebra that encodes finite-energy contributions to scattering and implies novel Ward identities. The soft current algebras are not independent but arise naturally from the hard ones. This provides a unified algebraic framework underlying quantum theory in flat spacetime.

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arXiv2025

Regular celestial amplitudes

Conventional massless celestial amplitudes are distributional and fail to realize the celestial OPE -- most sharply in the non-MHV paradox, where OPEs predict nonzero celestial amplitudes with helicities $-{+}{+}+$ that are known to vanish at tree level. To resolve this, we introduce regular celestial amplitudes. We demonstrate that at tree-level, these amplitudes are non-distributional and, crucially, consistent with the celestial OPE. This suggests a revised dictionary: CCFT correlators are the regular, not conventional, celestial amplitudes.

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arXiv2025

Amplitude from crossing-symmetric celestial OPE

Assuming the existence of crossing symmetric celestial OPE, we propose a method to reconstruct four-point massless scattering amplitudes in the framework of celestial holography. This method relies only on CFT techniques and a remarkable property: scattering amplitudes can be derived from a single conformal block coefficient in celestial CFT. Utilizing this method, we reconstruct the MHV amplitudes in pure Yang-Mills, pure gravity, and Einstein-Yang-Mills theories.

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arXiv2024

Celestial Optical Theorem

We establish the nonperturbative celestial optical theorem from the unitarity of $S$-matrix. This theorem provides a set of nonperturbative bootstrap equations of the conformal partial wave (CPW) coefficients. The celestial optical theorem implies that the imaginary part of CPW coefficient with appropriate conformal dimensions is non-negative. By making certain assumptions and using the celestial optical theorem, we derive nonperturbative results concerning the analytic structure of CPW coefficients. We discover that the CPW coefficients of four massless particles must and only have simple poles located at specific positions. The CPW coefficients involving massive particles exhibit double-trace poles, indicating the existence of double-trace operators in nonperturbative CCFT. It is worth noting that, in contrast to AdS/CFT, the conformal dimensions of double-trace operators do not receive anomalous dimensions.

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arXiv2024

Massive celestial amplitudes and celestial amplitudes beyond four points

We compute scalar three-point celestial amplitudes involving two and three massive scalars. The three-point coefficient of celestial amplitudes with two massive scalars contains a hypergeometric function, and the one with three massive scalars can be represented as a triple Mellin-Barnes integral. Using these three-point celestial amplitudes, we investigate the conformal block expansions of five- and six-point scalar celestial amplitudes in the comb channel. We observe the presence of two-particle operators in the conformal block expansion of five-point celestial amplitudes, which confirms the previous analysis by taking multi-collinear limit. Moreover, we find that there are new three-particle operators in the conformal block expansion of six-point celestial amplitudes. Based on these findings, we conjecture that exchanges of $n$-particle operators can be observed by considering the comb channel conformal block expansion of $(n+3)$-point massless celestial amplitudes. Finally, we show that a new series of operators appears when turning on the mass of the first incoming particle. The leading operator in this series can be interpreted as a two-particle exchange in the OPE of one massive and one massless scalars.

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arXiv2023

Split representation in celestial holography

We develop a split representation for celestial amplitudes in celestial holography, by cutting internal lines of Feynman diagrams in Minkowski space. More explicitly, the bulk-to-bulk propagators associated with the internal lines are expressed as a product of two boundary-to-bulk propagators with a coinciding boundary point integrated over the celestial sphere. Applying this split representation, we compute the conformal partial wave and conformal block expansions of celestial four-point functions of massless scalars and photons on the Euclidean celestial sphere. In the $t$-channel massless scalar amplitude, we observe novel intermediate exchanges of staggered modules in the conformal block expansion.

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arXiv2023

Constructing Carrollian Field Theories from Null Reduction

In this paper, we propose a novel way to construct off-shell actions of $d$-dimensional Carrollian field theories by considering the null-reduction of the Bargmann invariant actions in $d+1$ dimensions. This is based on the fact that $d$-dimensional Carrollian symmetry is the restriction of the $(d+1)$-dimensional Bargmann symmetry to a null hyper-surface. We focus on free scalar field theory and electromagnetic field theory, and show that the electric and magnetic sectors of these theories originate from different Bargmann invariant actions in one higher dimension. In the cases of the massless free scalar field and $d=4$ electromagnetic field, we verify Carrollian conformal invariance of the resulting theories, and find that there appear naturally chain representations and staggered modules of Carrollian conformal algebra.

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arXiv2022

On Galilean Conformal Bootstrap II: $\xi=0$ sector

In this work, we continue our work on two dimensional Galilean conformal field theory (GCFT$_2$). Our previous work (arXiv:2011.11092) focused on the $\xi\neq 0$ sector, here we investigate the more subtle $\xi=0$ sector to complete the discussion. The case $\xi=0$ is degenerate since there emerge interesting null states in a general $\xi=0$ boost multiplet. We specify these null states and work out the resulting selection rules. Then, we compute the $\xi=0$ global GCA blocks and find that they can be written as a linear combination of several building blocks, each of which can be obtained from a $sl(2,\mathbb{R})$ Casimir equation. These building blocks allow us to give an Euclidean inversion formula as well. As a consistency check, we study four-point functions of certain vertex operators in the BMS free scalar theory. In this case, the $\xi=0$ sector is the only allowable sector in the propagating channel. We find that the direct expansion of the 4-point function reproduces the global GCA block and is consistent with the inversion formula.

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arXiv2022

The Shadow Formalism of Galilean CFT$_2$

In this work, we develop the shadow formalism for two-dimensional Galilean conformal field theory (GCFT$_2$). We define the principal series representation of Galilean conformal symmetry group and find its relation with the Wigner classification, then we determine the shadow transform of local operators. Using this formalism we derive the OPE blocks, Clebsch-Gordan kernels, conformal blocks and conformal partial waves. A new feature is that the conformal block admits additional branch points, which would destroy the convergence of OPE for certain parameters. We establish another inversion formula different from the previous one, but get the same result when decomposing the four-point functions in the mean field theory (MFT). We also construct a continuous series of bilocal actions of MFT, and an exceptional series of local actions, one of which is the BMS free scalar model. We notice that there is an outer automorphism of the Galilean conformal symmetry, and the GCFT$_2$ can be regarded as null defect in higher dimensional CFTs.

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arXiv2021

On Higher-dimensional Carrollian and Galilean Conformal Field Theories

In this paper, we study the Carrollian and Galilean conformal field theories (CCFT and GCFT) in $d>2$ dimensions. We construct the highest weight representations (HWR) of Carrollian and Galilean conformal algebra (CCA and GCA). Even though the two algebras have different structures, their HWRs share similar structure, because their rotation subalgebras are isomorphic. In both cases, we find that the finite dimensional representations are generally reducible but indecomposable, and can be organized into the multiplets. Moreover, it turns out that the multiplet representations in $d>2$ CCA and GCA carry not only the simple chain structure appeared in logCFT or $2d$ GCFT, but also more generally the net structures. We manage to classify all the allowed chain representations. Furthermore we discuss the two-point and three-point correlators by using the Ward identities. We mainly focus on the two-point correlators of the operators in chain representations. Even in this relative simple case, we find some novel features: multiple-level structure, shortage of the selection rule on the representations, undetermined 2-pt coefficients, etc.. We find that the non-trivial correlators could only appear for the representations of certain structure, and the correlators are generally polynomials of time coordinates for CCFT (spacial coordinates for GCFT), whose orders depend on the levels of the correlators.

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arXiv2021

On Galilean conformal bootstrap

In this work, we develop conformal bootstrap for Galilean conformal field theory (GCFT). In a GCFT, the Hilbert space could be decomposed into quasiprimary states and its global descendants. Different from the usual conformal field theory, the quasi-primary states in a GCFT constitute multiplets, which are block-diagonized under the Galilean boost operator. More importantly the multiplets include the states of negative norms, indicating the theory is not unitary. We compute global blocks of the multiplets, and discuss the expansion of four-point functions in terms of the global blocks of the multiplets. Furthermore we do the harmonic analysis for the Galilean conformal symmetry and obtain an inversion formula. As the first step to apply the Galilean conformal bootstrap, we construct generalized Galilean free theory (GGFT) explicitly. We read the data of GGFT by using Taylor series expansion of four-point function and the inversion formula independently, and find exact agreement. We discuss some novel features in the Galilean conformal bootstrap, due to the non-semisimpleness of the Galilean conformal algebra and the non-unitarity of the GCFTs.

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