Dr. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski (Princeton Center for Theoretical Science)
"Building Celestial Holography"
A fundamental curiosity to determine: what the symmetries of nature are, how black holes process quantum information, and what the ultimate ultraviolet description of our universe is leading us to look for a new framework to describe scattering.
Celestial Holography aims to apply the holographic principle to spacetimes with vanishing cosmological constant. It maps four-dimensional scattering matrix elements to correlators in a
two-dimensional conformal field theory living on the night sky. This map possesses a number of surprising features. It emphasizes infinite-dimensional symmetry enhancements, which are typically hidden in infrared factorization theorems for amplitudes; reorganizes
collinear limits as conformal field theory operator product expansions, and mixes ultraviolet and infrared behavior in a manner that will allow us to make general claims about scattering not obvious from perturbation theory.
At its foundation are three hallmarks of the infrared: asymptotic symmetries that transform our phase space, factorizations that occur when scatterers become soft, and memory effects that provide an experimental testing ground. We will start by reviewing the manner in which these ideas are interconnected, show how this footing leads us to Celestial Holography, and then review the current progress in constructing this holographic dictionary.