Celestial energy-energy correlation in Yang-Mills theory and gravity

Abstract

We introduce the celestial energy-energy correlator (cEEC), an infrared and collinear safe observable that makes the celestial conformal symmetry of four-dimensional scattering manifest. The cEEC is defined as a correlation function of average null energy operators measured on boost eigenstates and takes the form of a four-point function in a fictitious two-dimensional conformal field theory on the celestial sphere. An important feature of the cEEC is that it smoothly interpolates between different key regimes of perturbative gauge theory and gravity, such as the collinear limit, the Sudakov limit, and the Regge limit. We compute the cEEC to the first nontrivial order in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory, pure Yang-Mills theory, Einstein gravity, and $\mathcal{N}=8$ supergravity. In $\mathcal{N}=8$ supergravity, the cEEC is uniquely determined by celestial symmetries and boundary data, demonstrating that bootstrap methods can yield closed-form results for this class of observables.

Comments: 9 pages, 7 figures; version updated to match the published article