Ambidextrous light transforms for celestial amplitudes

Abstract Low multiplicity celestial amplitudes of gluons and gravitons tend to be distributional in the celestial coordinates z, z ¯ $$ \overline{z} $$ . We provide a new systematic remedy to this situation by studying celestial amplitudes in a basis of light transformed boost eigenstates. Motivated by a novel equivalence between light transforms and Witten’s half-Fourier transforms to twistor space, we light transform every positive helicity state in the coordinate z and every negative helicity state in z ¯ $$ \overline{z} $$ . With examples, we show that this “ambidextrous” prescription beautifully recasts two- and three-point celestial amplitudes in terms of standard conformally covariant structures. These are used to extract examples of celestial OPE for light transformed operators. We also study such amplitudes at higher multiplicity by constructing the Grassmannian representation of tree-level gluon celestial amplitudes as well as their light transforms. The formulae for n-point N k−2MHV amplitudes take the form of Euler-type integrals over regions in Gr(k, n) cut out by positive energy constraints.