The light-ray OPE and conformal colliders
Abstract
We derive a nonperturbative, convergent operator product expansion (OPE) for null-integrated operators on the same null plane in a CFT. The objects appearing in the expansion are light-ray operators, whose matrix elements can be computed by the generalized Lorentzian inversion formula. For example, a product of average null energy (ANEC) operators has an expansion in the light-ray operators that appear in the stress-tensor OPE. An important application is to collider event shapes. The light-ray OPE gives a nonperturbative expansion for event shapes in special functions that we call celestial blocks. As an example, we apply the celestial block expansion to energy-energy correlators in N = 4 Super Yang-Mills theory. Using known OPE data, we find perfect agreement with previous results both at weak and strong coupling, and make new predictions at weak coupling through 4 loops (NNNLO).
Additional Information
© 2021 The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Received: June 8, 2020; Accepted: December 2, 2020; Published: January 21, 2021. We thank Mikhail Alfimov, Cyuan Han Chang, Clay Córdova, Lance Dixon, Claude Duhr, Tom Faulkner, Tom Hartman, Johannes Henn, Gregory Korchemsky, Adam Levine, Juan Maldacena, Ian Moult, Gavin Salam, Amit Sever, Emery Sokatchev, and Kai Yan for discussions. We thank Lance Dixon, Ian Moult, and Hua Xing Zhu for sharing a draft of their work before publication [32]. We also thank Gregory Korchemsky for sharing a draft of his work before publication [31]. We thank Nikolay Gromov for producing and sharing with us figure 14. DSD is supported by Simons Foundation grant 488657 (Simons Collaboration on the Nonperturbative Bootstrap), a Sloan Research Fellowship, and a DOE Early Career Award under grant No. DE-SC0019085. PK is supported by DOE grant No. DE-SC0009988. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY-1748958.Attached Files
Published - Koloğlu2021_Article_TheLight-rayOPEAndConformalCol.pdf
Submitted - 1905.01311.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 97011
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190709-151426552
- Simons Foundation
- 488657
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-SC0019085
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-SC0009988
- NSF
- PHY-1748958
- Created
-
2019-07-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics
- Other Numbering System Name
- CALT-TH
- Other Numbering System Identifier
- 2019-013