Celestial Conformal Colliders

While the ‘soft physics’ investigations have naturally focused on (conformally) soft gauge bosons and gravitons, their collinear limits, and symmetry interpretations, the matter modes that they couple to are equally important. Indeed, Cordova and Shao realized the BMS algebra via light-ray operators constructed from the stress tensor on a fixed light sheet in any unitary (bulk) CFT. Moreover, these matter symmetry generators as well as generalizations of stress tensor light-ray operators featured in conformal collider physics are celestial quasi-primaries! Despite this being mentioned in passing in the seminal work of Hofman-Maldacena, there remains a disconnect between the very rich CFT literature building of this work and the celestial efforts. We are then in a position to fill in this gap. In [2211.14287] we initiated the "celestial conformal colliders" by showing how to extend Cordova-Shao from BMS to w1+∞. As we embark on this initial exploration of celestial conformal colliders, it becomes evident that a rich interplay between various research programs is on the horizon, for instance, the phase space representation of celestial symmetries could be connected to detector operators and consequently infrared-finite amplitudes or event shapes (in the LHC phenomenology community, these are linked to "jet substructure"). Below, we elaborate on some efforts and questions that are poised to drive this intriguing synergy forward.