Light-Transformed Carrollian OPEs and the Four-Gluon Spectral Bootstrap
Abstract
Scattering amplitudes of massless particles can be rewritten as correlation functions of light-transformed operators at null infinity, on which the Carrollian symmetries act. We ask how much of the four-gluon tree amplitude is determined by the operator product expansion of these operators. When two gluons become collinear, the exchanged gluon and all of its descendants combine into a single function of the null time of ℐ+ and angular separations of the pair on the celestial sphere. We show that this function is fixed by the Ward identities, which reduce to Kummer's differential equation, and by the signs of the energies, which select one combination of its two solutions. We then expand the same amplitude in massive two-particle states of the physical scattering channel and find that the collinear data control the expansion at large spin. Each of the two collinear poles of the amplitude determines one of the two infinite sequences of partial-wave coefficients in closed form. Once both poles are imposed, crossing symmetry and the scaling of the correlator in Carroll time fix the tree spectrum uniquely among amplitudes with only the physical collinear poles, up to a single subtraction constant at the collinear boundary.
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BibTeX
@misc{banerjee2026lighttransformed,
title = {{Light-Transformed Carrollian OPEs and the Four-Gluon Spectral Bootstrap}},
author = {Sourish Banerjee and Rudranil Basu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.41281},
eprint = {2610.41281},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41281},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Light-Transformed Carrollian OPEs and the Four-Gluon Spectral Bootstrap
AU - Sourish Banerjee
AU - Rudranil Basu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/30
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.41281
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41281
AB - Scattering amplitudes of massless particles can be rewritten as correlation functions of light-transformed operators at null infinity, on which the Carrollian symmetries act. We ask how much of the four-gluon tree amplitude is determined by the operator product expansion of these operators. When two gluons become collinear, the exchanged gluon and all of its descendants combine into a single function of the null time of ℐ^+ and angular separations of the pair on the celestial sphere. We show that this function is fixed by the Ward identities, which reduce to Kummer's differential equation, and by the signs of the energies, which select one combination of its two solutions. We then expand the same amplitude in massive two-particle states of the physical scattering channel and find that the collinear data control the expansion at large spin. Each of the two collinear poles of the amplitude determines one of the two infinite sequences of partial-wave coefficients in closed form. Once both poles are imposed, crossing symmetry and the scaling of the correlator in Carroll time fix the tree spectrum uniquely among amplitudes with only the physical collinear poles, up to a single subtraction constant at the collinear boundary.
ER -