Associativity of celestial OPE, higher spins and self-duality

Abstract

We highlight and clarify the connection between several ideas and self-dual theories: (a) the operator product expansion (OPE) associativity in celestial conformal field theory (CCFT); (b) the vanishing of tree-level amplitudes; (c) the Jacobi identity for the "gauge" algebra; (d) the light-cone holomorphic constraints. Naturally, (b), (c), or (d) are closely related to self-duality. In particular, the recently classified arXiv:2505.12839 chiral higher-spin theories with one- and two-derivative interactions (i.e. with gauge and gravitational interactions, which are extensions of self-dual Yang-Mills and self-dual gravity) also satisfy the OPE associativity constraint. We discuss the OPE associativity constraint and the holomorphic constraint for the most general class of cubic vertices.