Event Details

Celestial conformal field theory (CCFT) is a conjectured theory living on the celestial sphere of the asymptotic boundary of Minkowski space. In analogy to the usual AdS/CFT dictionary, CCFTs would be the dual to gravitational theories in the bulk, with bulk scattering amplitudes being computed by correlation functions on the celestial sphere. OPE coefficients are basic building blocks of CFTs which should also have an analogue in CCFTs. Leading order OPEs for CCFT OPEs can be extracted from amplitudes using chiral collinear limits, but there's still no direct computation using the CCFT itself since we lack a first principles definition of them. In this talk I will explain how these leading OPEs can be computed using an unusual kind of string theory, such that the worldsheet OPE induces a target space OPE, reproducing results in the literature in a much simpler way. In certain cases the full OPE can be computed from the string theory and a sector of the target space CCFT can be identified with a sector of the string theory. This is also related to recent developments on chiral holographic algebras which I will if time permits.