Celestial Conformal Primaries in Effective Field Theories

Abstract

Scattering amplitudes in $d+2$ dimensions can be recast as correlators of conformal primary operators in a putative holographic CFT$_d$ by working in a basis of boost eigenstates instead of momentum eigenstates. It has been shown previously that conformal primary operators with $\Delta \in \frac{d}{2} + i {\mathbb R}$ form a basis for massless one-particle representations. In this paper, we consider more general conformal primary operators with $\Delta \in {\mathbb C}$ and show that completeness, normalizability, and consistency with CPT implies that we must restrict the scaling dimensions to either $\Delta \in \frac{d}{2} + i {\mathbb R}$ or $\Delta \in {\mathbb R}$. Unlike those with $\Delta \in \frac{d}{2} + i {\mathbb R}$, the conformal primaries with $\Delta \in {\mathbb R}$ can be constructed without knowledge of the UV and can therefore be defined in effective field theories. With additional analyticity assumptions, we can restrict $\Delta \in 2 - {\mathbb Z}_{\geq0}$ or $\Delta \in \frac{1}{2}-{\mathbb Z}_{\geq0}$ for bosonic or fermionic operators, respectively.