Conformal partial wave expansion of celestial correlators

A novel definition of holographic correlation functions on the celestial sphere of Minkowski space was recently introduced in [1] as the extrapolation of bulk time-ordered correlation functions to the celestial sphere. In this work, focusing on theories of scalar fields iyn (d + 2)-dimensional Minkowski space, we show that in perturbation theory such celestial correlation functions admit a conformal partial wave expansion with meromorphic spectral density, and hence also an expansion into conformal blocks. This is achieved in the hyperbolic slicing of Minkowski space by extending the harmonic function (“spectral”) decomposition of AdS bulk-to-bulk propagators to the Minkowski Feynman propagator. We study the conformal partial wave expansion of celestial correlators for four-point contact and tree-level exchange diagrams, and extract the contributions to their conformal block expansions in the direct channel. When all scalar fields are massless, the tree-level exchange diagram takes a remarkably simple form and is given by a finite sum of conformal blocks (and, for d = 2, their derivatives as well). We also discuss the conformal partial wave expansion at the non-perturbative level, where Lorentz unitarity manifests as positivity of the spectral density.