Celestial gluon and graviton OPE at loop level

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the loop corrections to celestial OPE for gluons and gravitons. Even at the loop level, the soft gluons and gravitons have conformal dimensions ∆ = 1 −$${\mathbb{Z}}_{\ge 0}$$. The only novelty is the presence of higher poles. At one loop level, there are two types of conformal soft gluons with a single pole and a double pole in the ∆ plane. The celestial OPEs are obtained using the collinear splitting functions. In the case of gluons, the splitting functions receive loop corrections. After taking the holomorphic soft limit, we find the OPE of conformal soft gluons. We find a novel mixing of simple and double poles soft gluon operators in the OPE. In the case of gravitons, where splitting functions are known to be all loop exact, we still find a wedge algebra of w∞ which is in addition to the wedge algebra of w1+∞ already found by Strominger.