Events

Abstract

The holographic principle proposes a duality between a quantum theory of gravity and a quantum theory of matter without gravity living on the boundary of the spacetime. A well-studied realization of the principle is the AdS/CFT correspondence. Recently, there has been rapid progress in extending this principle to asymptotically flat spacetimes, close to the one we inhabit. This new approach involves using insights from infrared physics to constrain quantum gravity scattering amplitudes and discover new symmetries and conservation laws.

In this talk, we will explore how the Celestial Holography program is fusing the Amplitudes, Bootstrap, and Quantum Gravity communities. In particular, we will develop a connection between conformal collider physics and the discovery of enhanced asymptotic symmetry algebras in celestial CFT. Specifically, we observe that the light-ray operators featured in the conformal collider literature are celestial primaries. This lets us rephrase the corresponding 4D CFT correlators as probing a conformally soft matter sector of the 2D celestial CFT (CCFT) and, in turn, extend the set of conformal collider operators based on the w_{1+∞} symmetry recently observed in CCFT.

We close by discussing some exciting directions that emerge from this collision of research programs.

Bio

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski  (PhD Harvard University, 2019) is a high energy theorist who joined the Perimeter faculty in 2021 after completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Princeton Centre for Theoretical Science. Her research prior to joining PI includes discovering infinite dimensional symmetry enhancements of the S-matrix, a new observable memory effect in gravity, and a framework for generalizing these features of infrared physics to other theories.