Celestial $w_{1+\infty}$ Symmetries from Twistor Space

Tim Adamo, Lionel Mason, Atul Sharma

Published 2021-10-12, updated 2022-03-08Version 3

We explain how twistor theory represents the self-dual sector of four dimensional gravity in terms of the loop group of Poisson diffeomorphisms of the plane via Penrose's non-linear graviton construction. The symmetries of the self-dual sector are generated by the corresponding loop algebra $Lw_{1+\infty}$ of the algebra $w_{1+\infty}$ of these Poisson diffeomorphisms. We show that these coincide with the infinite tower of soft graviton symmetries in tree-level perturbative gravity recently discovered in the context of celestial amplitudes. We use a twistor sigma model for the self-dual sector which describes maps from the Riemann sphere to the asymptotic twistor space defined from characteristic data at null infinity ${\mathcal I}$. We show that the OPE of the sigma model naturally encodes the Poisson structure on twistor space and gives rise to the celestial realization of $Lw_{1+\infty}$. The vertex operators representing soft gravitons in our model act as currents generating the wedge algebra of $w_{1+\infty}$ and produce the expected celestial OPE with hard gravitons of both helicities. We also discuss how the two copies of $Lw_{1+\infty}$, one for each of the self-dual and anti-self-dual sectors, are represented in the OPEs of vertex operators of the 4d ambitwistor string.