Celestial Chiral Algebras and Self-Dual Gravity

Abstract

Celestial holography suggests, among other things, that collinear singularities of graviton scattering amplitudes are described by the OPEs of some putative dual CFT. One of the great successes has been the insight that this duality is true at tree-level which led to the discovery of new infinite dimensional symmetry algebras of tree-level amplitudes in flat space closely related to w$_{1+\infty}$. This thesis studies these celestial chiral algebras in the light of twistor theory and derives tree-level deformations thereof induced by non-trivial background geometries that solve some form of the self-dual Einstein equations.