Notes on Conformal Soft Theorems and Recursion Relations in Gravity

Abstract

Celestial amplitudes are flat-space amplitudes which are Mellin-transformed to correlators living on the celestial sphere. In this note we present a recursion relation, based on a tree-level BCFW recursion, for gravitational celestial amplitudes and use it to explore the notion of conformal softness. As the BCFW formula exponentiates in the soft energy, it leads directly to conformal soft theorems in an exponential form. These appear from a soft piece of the amplitude characterized by a discrete family of singularities with weights $\Delta=1-\mathbb{Z}_+$. As a byproduct, in the case of the MHV sector we provide a direct celestial analogue of Hodges' recursion formula at all multiplicities.