Journal of High Energy Physics (Sep 2023)

The celestial chiral algebra of self-dual gravity on Eguchi-Hanson space

  • Roland Bittleston,
  • Simon Heuveline,
  • David Skinner

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2023)008
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2023, no. 9
pp. 1 – 45

Abstract

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Abstract We consider the twistor description of classical self-dual Einstein gravity in the presence of a defect operator wrapping a certain ℂℙ1. The backreaction of this defect deforms the flat twistor space to that of Eguchi-Hanson space. We show that the celestial chiral algebra of self-dual gravity on the Eguchi-Hanson background is likewise deformed to become the loop algebra of a certain scaling limit of the family of W(μ)-algebras, where the scaling limit is controlled by the radius of the Eguchi-Hanson core. We construct this algebra by computing the Poisson algebra of holomorphic functions on the deformed twistor space, and check this result with a space-time calculation of the leading contribution to the gravitational splitting function. The loop algebra of a general W(μ)-algebra (away from the scaling limit) similarly arises as the celestial chiral algebra of Moyal-deformed self-dual gravity on Eguchi-Hanson space. We also obtain corresponding results for self-dual Yang-Mills.

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