Partial Differential Equations for MHV Celestial Amplitudes in Liouville Theory

Abstract

In this note, we continue our study of Liouville theory and celestial amplitudes by deriving a set of partial differential equations governing the $n$-point MHV celestial amplitudes for gluons and gravitons, parametrised by the Liouville coupling constant $b$. These equations provide a systematic framework for computing the perturbative expansion in $b$ of the celestial amplitudes, which are known to reproduce the tree-level MHV $n$-point functions for pure Yang-Mills and Einstein gravity in the semiclassical $b\rightarrow0$ limit. We demonstrate that the $\mathcal{O}(b^{2})$ corrections are logarithmic for both gluons and gravitons. Furthermore, we compute the correction to the celestial operator product expansion (OPE) parametrised by $b^{2}$. In the case of gluons, the resulting deformation of the celestial OPE is shown to be isomorphic to the one-loop correction of the celestial OPE in pure Yang-Mills theory. We then propose that "celestial Liouville theory," extended beyond the semiclassical limit, encodes the one-loop regime of pure Yang-Mills theory. A formally analogous computation is performed for Einstein gravity to ascertain the deformation of the celestial OPE induced by a non-zero Liouville coupling constant. However, as we shall explain, the physical interpretation of this result remains an open problem due to the intricate nature of the loop-corrected holomorphic collinear limit in graviton scattering amplitudes.