Celestial locality and the Jacobi identity

Abstract

We show the equivalence of several different tests of the Jacobi identity for celestial currents at tree level, in particular finding a simple, practical condition on hard momentum space 4-point amplitudes in any EFT. Along the way we clarify the role of the order of soft and collinear limits in obstructing the Jacobi identity for soft insertions and we argue that, despite their current-algebra-like properties, soft insertions as formulated in this paper cannot be interpreted as local operators in celestial conformal field theory.