Paper detail

Operator product expansions and recoil

Some issues of recoil effects in AdS/CFT are studied from the point of view of OPE expansions for generalized free fields. We show that the conformal group structure encodes the relative energies and momenta at a collision center. This is done by being careful with the analysis of Clebsch-Gordan coefficients for an $SL(2)$ subalgebra of the conformal group. The collision fraction of kinetic energy carried by the particles is derived from a probability distribution that arises from these coefficients. We specifically identify a precise statement of when recoil of a heavy particle in AdS can be ignored: the maximum probability is for the heavy particle to be in its ground state. We also argue how a notion of reduced mass appears in these collisions, in the limit where the particles are moving slowly with respect to each other. This controls the notion of the impact parameter of the collision.