The structure of IR divergences in celestial gluon amplitudes

• Main Authors: Hernán A. González, Francisco Rojas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2021-06-01
• Series: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Subjects: Conformal Field Theory; Scattering Amplitudes; Field Theories in Lower Dimensions
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2021)171

Abstract The all-loop resummation of SU(N) gauge theory amplitudes is known to factorize into an IR-divergent (soft and collinear) factor and a finite (hard) piece. The divergent factor is universal, whereas the hard function is a process-dependent quantity. We prove that this factorization persists for the corresponding celestial amplitudes. Moreover, the soft/collinear factor becomes a scalar correlator of the product of renormalized Wilson lines defined in terms of celestial data. Their effect on the hard amplitude is a shift in the scaling dimensions by an infinite amount, proportional to the cusp anomalous dimension. This leads us to conclude that the celestial-IR-safe gluon amplitude corresponds to a expectation value of operators dressed with Wilson line primaries. These results hold for finite N. In the large N limit, we show that the soft/collinear correlator can be described in terms of vertex operators in a Coulomb gas of colored scalar primaries with nearest neighbor interactions. In the particular cases of four and five gluons in planar N $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 4 SYM theory, where the hard factor is known to exponentiate, we establish that the Mellin transform converges in the UV thanks to the fact that the cusp anomalous dimension is a positive quantity. In other words, the very existence of the full celestial amplitude is owed to the positivity of the cusp anomalous dimension.