Yang-Mills as a Liouville theory

We propose a description of the gluon scattering amplitudes as the inverse Mellin transforms of the conformal correlators of light operators in two-dimensional Liouville theory tensored with WZW-like chiral currents on the celestial sphere. The dimensions of operators are Mellin dual to gluon light cone energies while their positions are determined by the gluon momentum directions. Tree-level approximation in Yang-Mills theory corresponds to the semiclassical limit of Liouville theory. By comparing subleading corrections, we find b2 = (8 pi 2)-1 beta 0 g2(M), where b is the Liouville coupling constant, g(M) is the Yang Mills coupling at the renormalization scale M and beta 0 is the one-loop coefficient of the Yang-Mills beta function.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/). Funded by SCOAP3.