It is shown how tree-level multi-gluon helicity amplitudes with an arbitrary number of off-shell external gluons can be calculated via BCFW recursion. Compact expressions for helicity amplitudes for scattering processes of three and four gluons, with up to three of them off-shell, are presented. Also, maximum-helicity-violating configurations are identified for up to two off-shell gluons, and the expressions for their helicity amplitudes for an arbitrary number of on-shell gluons are derived.
The appearance of BCFW on-shell recursion relation has deepen our understanding of quantum field theory, especially the one with gauge boson and graviton. To be able to write the BCFW recursion relation, the knowledge of boundary contributions is needed. So far, most applications have been constrained to the cases where the boundary contribution is zero. In this paper, we show that for some theories, although there is no proper deformation to annihilate the boundary contribution, its effects can be analyzed in simple way, thus we do able to write down the BCFW recursion relation with boundary …
Recently, an extension of the BCFW on-shell recursion relation suitable to compute gauge invariant scattering amplitudes with off-shell particles has been presented for Yang-Mills theories with fermions. In particular, 4- and 5-point amplitudes have been completely worked out. The results are needed for the study of multi-parton scattering at hadron colliders in the framework of High Energy Factorization (HEF).
We investigate the application of the BCFW recursion relation to scattering amplitudes with one off-shell particle in a Yang-Mills theory with fermions. We provide a set of conditions of applicability of the BCFW recursion, stressing some important differences with respect to the pure on-shell case. We show how the formulas for Maximally-Helicity-Violating (MHV) configurations with any number of partons, which are well known in the fully on-shell case, are generalized to this kinematic regime. We also derive analytic expressions for all the helicity configurations of the 5-point color-stripped…
We describe an efficient implementation of the BCFW recursion relations for tree-amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills, which can generate analytic formulae for general N^kMHV colour-ordered helicity-amplitudes-which, in particular, includes all those of non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills. This note accompanies the public release of the Mathematica package "bcfw", which can quickly (and automatically) generate these amplitudes in a form that should be easy to export to any computational framework of interest, or which can be evaluated directly within Mathematica given external states specified by four…
Recently, it has been shown that on-shell scattering amplitudes can be constructed by the Feynman-tree theorem combined with the BCFW recursion relations. Since the BCFW relations are restricted to tree diagrams, the preceding application of the Feynman-tree theorem is essential. In this way amplitudes can be constructed by on-shell and gauge-invariant tree amplitudes. Here we want to apply this method to the electron-photon vertex correction. We present all the single, double, and triple phase-space tensor integrals explicitly and show that the sum of amplitudes coincides with the result of t…
Recently it has been shown that in gauge theories amplitudes to any perturbation order can be obtained by glueing together simple three-point on-shell amplitudes. These three-point amplitudes in turn are fixed by locality and Lorentz invariance. This factorization into three-point on-shell amplitudes follows from the BCFW recursion relations and the Feynman-tree theorem. In an explicit example, that is, the four-gluon amplitude with all plus helicities, we illustrate the method. In conventional calculation this amplitude corresponds to one-loop box diagrams.
We complete the generalisation of the BCFW recursion relation to the off-shell case, allowing for the computation of tree level scattering amplitudes for full High Energy Factorisation (HEF), i.e. with both incoming partons having a non-vanishing transverse momentum. We provide explicit results for color-ordered amplitudes with two off-shell legs in massless QCD up to 4 point, continuing the program begun in two previous papers. For the 4-fermion amplitudes, which are not BCFW-recursible, we perform a diagrammatic computation, so as to offer a complete set of expressions. We explicitly show an…
We construct a modified on-shell BCFW recursion relation to derive compact analytic representations of tree-level amplitudes in QED. As an application, we study the amplitudes of a fermion pair coupling to an arbitrary number of photons and give compact formulae for the NMHV and NNMHV case. We demonstrate that the new recursion relation reduces the growth in complexity with additional photons to be exponential rather than factorial.
We present a proof of the Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten tree-level recursion relation for gluon amplitudes in QCD, based on a direct equivalence between BCFW decompositions and Feynman diagrams. We demonstrate that this equivalence can be made explicit when working in a convenient gauge. We exhibit that gauge invariance and the particular structure of Yang-Mills vertices guarantees the validity of the BCFW construction.
The BCFW recursion relation allows to calculate tree-level scattering amplitudes in generalized Yang-Mills theory and, in particular, four-particle amplitudes for the production rate of non-Abelian tensor gauge bosons of arbitrary high spin in the fusion of two gluons. The consistency of the calculations in different kinematical channels is fulfilled when all dimensionless cubic coupling constants between vector bosons (gluons) and high spin non-Abelian tensor gauge bosons are equal to the Yang-Mills coupling constant. There are no high derivative cubic vertices in the generalized Yang-Mills t…
We study the QCD scattering amplitudes for \bar{q}q \to gg and \bar{q}q \to ggg where q is a massive fermion. Using a particular choice of massive fermion spinor we are able to derive very compact expressions for the partial spin amplitudes for the 2 \to 2 process. We then investigate the corresponding 2 \to 3 amplitudes using the BCFW recursion technique. For the helicity conserving partial amplitudes we again derive very compact expressions, but were unable to treat the helicity-flip amplitudes recursively, except for the case where all the gluon helicities are the same. We therefore evaluat…
We study the application of BCFW recursion relations to the QED processes $0\to e^- e^+ n γ$. Based on 6-point amplitudes (both MHVA and NMHVA) computed from Feynman diagrams in the Berends-Giele gauge, we conduct a comprehensive study on all different shifts. Then we propose a new shift (LLYZ shift) which can lead to the full amplitudes for these processes and can have some realistic computation advantages. We compare the number of terms and the independent amplitudes of this novel shift with a few typical shifts.
In a recent paper [arXiv:1106.0166], boundary contributions in BCFW recursion relations have been related to roots of amplitudes. In this paper, we make several analyses regarding to this problem. Firstly, we use different ways to re-derive boundary BCFW recursion relations given in [arXiv:1106.0166]. Secondly, we generalize factorization limits to z-dependent ones, where information of roots is more transparent. Then, we demon- strate our analysis with several examples. In general, relations from factorization limits cannot guarantee to find explicit expressions for roots.
Continuing the study of boundary BCFW recursion relation of tree level amplitudes initiated in \cite{Feng:2009ei}, we consider boundary contributions coming from fermion pair deformation. We present the general strategy for these boundary contributions and demonstrate calculations using two examples, i.e, the standard QCD and deformed QCD with anomalous magnetic momentum coupling. As a by-product, we have extended BCFW recursion relation to off-shell gluon current, where because off-shell gluon current is not gauge invariant, a new feature must be cooperated.
We present a program to evaluate tree-level multi-gluon amplitudes with up to two of them off-shell. Furthermore, it evaluates squared amplitudes summed over colors and helicities for up to six external gluons. It employs both analytic expressions, obtained via BCFW recursion, and numerical BCFW recursion. It has been validated numerically with the help of an independent program employing numerical Dyson-Schwinger recursion.
We show how by reassembling the tree level gluon Feynman diagrams in a convenient gauge, space-cone, we can explicitly derive the BCFW recursion relations. Moreover, the proof of the gluon recursion relations hinges on an identity in momentum space which we show to be nothing but the Fourier transform of the largest time equation. Our approach lends itself to natural generalizations to include massive scalars and even fermions.
We construct two and three-line shifts for tree-level amplitude with massless and/or massive particles, and provide a method to construct general multi-line shifts for all masses. We choose the massless-massive BCFW shift from these shifts and examine its validity in renormalizable theories. Using such a shift, we find that amplitudes with at least one massless vector boson are constructible. This reveals the importance of gauge theory in the construction of amplitudes with massive particles. We also find that this kind of amplitudes have a cancellation related to group structure among differe…
Using newly proposed BCF/BCFW recursion relations, compact formulas are obtained for tree-level n-gluon amplitudes of helicity structure --++...+. We then make an extension of these recursion relations to include fermions of multi-flavors, from which MHV and \bar{MHV} amplitudes are reproduced. We also calculate non-MHV amplitudes of processes with two fermions and four gluons. Results thus obtained are equivalent to those obtained by extended CSW prescriptions, and those by conventional field theory calculations.
We analyze the validity of BCFW recursion relations for currents of n - 2 gluons and two massive quarks, where one of the quarks is off shell and the remaining particles are on shell. These currents are gauge-dependent and can be used as ingredients in the unitarity-based approach to computing one-loop amplitudes. The validity of BCFW recursion relations is well known to depend on the so-called boundary behavior of the currents as the momentum shift parameter goes to infinity. With off-shell currents, a new potential problem arises, namely unphysical poles that depend on the choice of gauge. W…
Motivated by new techniques in the computation of scattering amplitudes of massless particles in four dimensions, like BCFW recursion relations, the question of how much structure of the S-matrix can be determined from purely S-matrix arguments has received new attention. The BCFW recursion relations for massless particles of spin 1 and 2 imply that the whole tree-level S-matrix can be determined in terms of three-particle amplitudes (evaluated at complex momenta). However, the known proofs of the validity of the relations rely on the Lagrangian of the theory, either by using Feynman diagrams …
The Ward identity in gauge theory constrains the behavior of the amplitudes. We discuss the Ward identity for amplitudes with a pair of shifted lines with complex momenta. This will induce a recursion relation identical to BCFW recursion relations at the finite poles of the complexified amplitudes. Furthermore, according to the Ward identity, it is also possible to transform the boundary term into a simple form, which can be obtained by a new recursion relation. For the amplitude with one off-shell line in pure Yang-Mills theory, we find this technique is effective for obtaining the amplitude …
It is well-known that the standard BCFW construction cannot be used for on-shell amplitudes in effective field theories due to bad behavior for large shifts. We show how to solve this problem in the case of the SU(N) non-linear sigma model, i.e. non-renormalizable model with infinite number of interaction vertices, using scaling properties of the semi-on-shell currents, and we present new on-shell recursion relations for all on-shell tree-level amplitudes in this theory.
In this article a first step is made towards the extension of Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten (BCFW) tree level on-shell recursion relations to integrands and integrals of scattering amplitudes to arbitrary loop order. Surprisingly, it is shown that the large BCFW shift limit of the integrands has the same structure as the corresponding tree level amplitude in any minimally coupled Yang-Mills theory in four or more dimensions. This implies that these integrands can be reconstructed from a subset of their `single cuts'. The main tool is powercounting Feynman graphs in a special lightcone gauge choic…
This article provides an introduction to on-shell recursion relations for calculations of tree-level amplitudes. Starting with the basics, such as spinor notations and color decompositions, we expose analytic properties of gauge-boson amplitudes, BCFW-deformations, the large $z$-behavior of amplitudes, and on-shell recursion relations of gluons. We discuss further developments of on-shell recursion relations, including generalization to other quantum field theories, supersymmetric theories in particular, recursion relations for off-shell currents, recursion relation with nonzero boundary contr…
In this note we show that under BCFW-deformation the large z behavior of permutation sum of color-ordered gluon amplitudes found by Boels and Isermann in arxiv:1109.5888 can be simply understood from the well known Kleiss-Kuijf relation and Bern-Carrasco-Johansson relation.
We investigate the construction of tree-level MHV gluon amplitudes in multiplet bases using BCFW recursion. The multiplet basis decomposition can either be obtained by decomposing results derived in (for example) the DDM basis or by formulating the recursion directly in the multiplet basis. We focus on the latter approach and show how to efficiently deal with the color structure appearing in the recursion. For illustration, we also explicitly calculate the four-, five- and six-gluon amplitudes.
We discuss recursion relations for scattering amplitudes with massive particles of any spin. They are derived via a two-parameter shift of momenta, combining a BCFW-type spinor shift with the soft limit of a massless particle involved in the process. The technical innovation is that spinors corresponding to massive momenta are also shifted. Our recursions lead to a reformulation of the soft theorems. The well-known Weinberg's soft factors are recovered and, in addition, the subleading factors appear reshaped such that they are directly applicable to massive amplitudes in the modern on-shell la…
The anomalous magnetic moment of the top quark may be measured during the first run of the LHC at 7 TeV. For these measurements, it will be useful to have available tree amplitudes with ttbar and arbitrarily many photons and gluons, including both QED and color anomalous magnetic moments. In this paper, we present a method for computing these amplitudes using the Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten (BCFW) recursion formula. Because we deal with an effective theory with higher-dimension couplings, there are roadblocks to a direct computation with the BCFW method. We evade these by using an auxiliary sca…
We study in detail the general structure and further properties of the tree-level amplitudes in the SU(N) nonlinear sigma model. We construct the flavor-ordered Feynman rules for various parameterizations of the SU(N) fields U(x), write down the Berends-Giele relations for the semi-on-shell currents and discuss their efficiency for the amplitude calculation in comparison with those of renormalizable theories. We also present an explicit form of the partial amplitudes up to ten external particles. It is well known that the standard BCFW recursive relations cannot be used for reconstruction of t…
One of the methods to calculate tree-level multi-gluon scattering amplitudes is to use the Berends-Giele recursion relation involving off-shell currents or off-shell amplitudes, if working in the light cone gauge. As shown in recent works using the light-front perturbation theory, solutions to these recursions naturally collapse into gauge invariant and gauge-dependent components, at least for some helicity configurations. In this work, we show that such structure is helicity independent and emerges from analytic properties of matrix elements of Wilson line operators, where the slope of the st…
We provide a new set of on-shell recursion relations for tree-level scattering amplitudes, which are valid for any non-trivial theory of massless particles. In particular, we reconstruct the scattering amplitudes from (a subset of) their poles and zeroes. The latter determine the boundary term arising in the BCFW-representation when the amplitudes do not vanish as some momenta are taken to infinity along some complex direction. Specifically, such a boundary term can be expressed as a sum of products of two on-shell amplitudes with fewer external states and a factor dependent on the location of…
We derive general tree-level recursion relations for amplitudes which include massive propagating particles. As an illustration, we apply these recursion relations to scattering amplitudes of gluons coupled to massive scalars. We provide new results for all amplitudes with a pair of scalars and n < 5 gluons. These amplitudes can be used as building blocks in the computation of one-loop 6-gluon amplitudes using unitarity based methods.
We present new recursion relations for tree amplitudes in gauge theory that give very compact formulas. Our relations give any tree amplitude as a sum over terms constructed from products of two amplitudes of fewer particles multiplied by a Feynman propagator. The two amplitudes in each term are physical, in the sense that all particles are on-shell and momentum conservation is preserved. This is striking, since it is just like adding certain factorization limits of the original amplitude to build up the full answer. As examples, we recompute all known tree-level amplitudes of up to seven gluo…
On-shell methods offer an alternative definition of quantum field theory at tree-level, replacing Feynman diagrams with recursion relations and interaction vertices with a handful of seed scattering amplitudes. In this paper we determine the simplest recursion relations needed to construct a general four-dimensional quantum field theory of massless particles. For this purpose we define a covering space of recursion relations which naturally generalizes all existing constructions, including those of BCFW and Risager. The validity of each recursion relation hinges on the large momentum behavior …
The Abelian Higgs model forms an essential part of the electroweak standard model: it is the sector containing only Z and Higgs bosons. We present a diagram-based proof of the tree-level unitarity of this model inside the unitary gauge, where only physical degrees of freedom occur. We derive combinatorial recursion relations for off-shell amplitudes in the massless approximation, which allows us to prove the cancellation of the first two orders in energy of unitarity-violating high-energy behaviour for any tree-level amplitude in this model. We describe a deformation of the amplitudes by exten…
We show how to apply the BCFW recursion relation to Feynman loop integrals with the help of the Feynman-tree theorem. We deconstruct in this way all Feynman diagrams in terms of on-shell subamplitudes. Every cut originating from the Feynman-tree theorem corresponds to an integration over the phase space of an unobserved particle pair. We argue that we can calculate scattering amplitudes alternatively by the construction of on-shell and gauge-invariant subamplitudes.
Recently a new recursion relation for tree-level gluon amplitudes in gauge theory has been discovered. We solve this recursion to obtain explicit formulas for the closed set of amplitudes with arbitrarily many positive and negative helicity gluons in a split helicity configuration. The solution admits a simple diagrammatic expansion in terms of zigzag diagrams. We comment on generalizations of this result.
I provide a basic introduction to modern helicity amplitude methods, including color organization, the spinor helicity formalism, and factorization properties. I also describe the BCFW (on-shell) recursion relation at tree level, and explain how similar ideas - unitarity and on-shell methods - work at the loop level. These notes are based on lectures delivered at the 2012 CERN Summer School and at TASI 2013.
We consider on-shell recursion relations for all Born QCD amplitudes. This includes amplitudes with several pairs of quarks and massive quarks. We give a detailed description on how to shift the external particles in spinor space and clarify the allowed helicities of the shifted legs. We proof that the corresponding meromorphic functions vanish at z --> infinity. As an application we obtain compact expressions for helicity amplitudes including a pair of massive quarks, one negative helicity gluon and an arbitrary number of positive helicity gluons.
We explore the on-shell recursion for tree-level scattering amplitudes with massive spinning particles. Based on the factorization structure encoded in the same way by two different recursion relations, we conjecture an all-multiplicity formula for two gauged massive particles of arbitrary spin and any number of identical-helicity gluons. Specializing to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), we solve the on-shell recursion relations in the presence of two pairs of massive quarks and an arbitrary number of identical-helicity gluons. We find closed-form expressions for the two distinct families of color…
Using the method of on-shell recursion relations we compute tree level amplitudes including D-dimensional scalars and fermions. These tree level amplitudes are needed for calculations of one-loop amplitudes in QCD involving external quarks and gluons.
We present a field theoretical proof of the conjectured KLT relation which states that the full tree-level scattering amplitude of gluons can be written as a product of color-ordered amplitude of gluons and color-ordered amplitude of scalars with only cubic vertex. To give a proof we establish the KK relation and BCJ relation of color-ordered scalar amplitude using BCFW recursion relation with nonzero boundary contributions. As a byproduct, an off-shell version of fundamental BCJ relation is proved, which plays an important role in our work.
In unitarity cut method, compact input of on-shell tree level amplitudes is crucial to simplify calculations. Although BCFW on-shell recursion relation gives very compact tree level amplitudes, they usually contain spurious poles. In this paper, we present a method to deal with this issue and provide explicit simple algebraic functions for various coefficients in the presence of spurious poles. As an application, we present analytic result (not just rational term) for one-loop five gluon A(-++++) with scalar propagator for the first time.
In recent years, the BCFW construction provided a very powerful tool for computing scattering amplitudes as well as it shed light on the perturbation theory structure. In this talk, we discuss the long-standing issue of the boundary term arising when the amplitudes do not vanish as some momenta are taken to infinity along some complex direction. In particular, we provide a new set of on-shell recursion relations valid for such theories and discuss its consequences on our understanding on the perturbation theory structure of the S-Matrix.
We apply the on-shell tree-level recursion relations of Britto, Cachazo, Feng and Witten to a variety of processes involving internal and external massive particles with spin. We show how to construct multi-vector boson currents where one or more off-shell vector bosons couples to a quark pair and number of gluons. We give compact results for single vector boson currents with up to six partons and double vector boson currents with up to four partons for all helicity combinations. We also provide expressions for single vector boson currents with a quark pair and an arbitrary number of gluons fo…
We calculate analytically tree level amplitudes for Higgs production via Weak Bosons Fusion (WBF) and QCD corrections to the Standard Model prediction (SM) by using the helicity spinor formalism. We provide the explicit expression for the amplitude with two gluons emission in the final state together with massless final two quarks. The massive generalization of the Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten (BCFW) recursion scheme is applied successfully obtaining compact results which agree with, and overcome in simplicity, the conventional Feynman diagrams approach.
We use supersymmetric Ward identities to relate multi-gluon helicity amplitudes involving a pair of massive quarks to amplitudes with massive scalars. This allows to use the recent results for scalar amplitudes with an arbitrary number of gluons obtained by on-shell recursion relations to obtain scattering amplitudes involving top quarks.
We analyze the off-shell scattering amplitudes in the framework of the light-front perturbation theory. It is shown that the previously derived recursion relation between tree level off-shell amplitudes in this formalism actually resums whole classes of graphs into a Wilson line. More precisely, we establish a correspondence between the light-front methods for the computation of the off-shell amplitudes and the approach which makes use of the matrix elements of straight infinite Wilson lines, which are manifestly gauge invariant objects. Furthermore, since it is needed to explicitly verify the…
The recently developed on-shell bootstrap for computing one-loop amplitudes in non-supersymmetric theories such as QCD combines the unitarity method with loop-level on-shell recursion. For generic helicity configurations, the recursion relations may involve undetermined contributions from non-standard complex singularities or from large values of the shift parameter. Here we develop a strategy for sidestepping difficulties through use of pairs of recursion relations. To illustrate the strategy, we present sets of recursion relations needed for obtaining n-gluon amplitudes in QCD. We give a rec…
Combining the Berends-Giele and on-shell recursion relations we obtain an extremely compact expression for the scattering amplitude of a complex scalar-antiscalar pair and an arbitrary number of positive helicity gluons. This is one of the basic building blocks for constructing other helicity configurations from recursion relations. We also show explicity that the all positive helicity gluons amplitude for heavy fermions is proportional to the scalar one, confirming in this way the recently advocated SUSY-like Ward identities relating both amplitudes.
We consider the process containing two quark lines and an arbitrary number of gluons in a spinor helicity framework. A current with two off-shell gluons appears in the amplitude. We first study this modified gluon current using recursion relations. The recursion relation for the modified gluon current is solved for the case of like-helicity gluons. We apply the modified gluon current to compute the amplitude for $q \bar q \rightarrow q \bar q gg \cdots g$ in the like-helicity gluon case.
We construct the gluon wave functions, fragmentation functions and scattering amplitudes within the light-front perturbation theory. Recursion relations on the light-front are constructed for the wave functions and fragmentation functions, which in the latter case are the light-front analogs of the Berends-Giele recursion relations. Using general relations between wave functions and scattering amplitudes it is demonstrated how to obtain the maximally-helicity violating amplitudes, and explicit verification of the results is based on simple examples.
We present the first calculation of two-quark and five-gluon tree amplitudes using on-shell recursion relations. These amplitudes are needed for tree level 5-jet cross-section and an essential ingredient for next-to-leading order 4-jet and next-to-next-to-leading order 3-jet production at hadronic colliders. Very compact expressions for all possible helicity configurations are provided, allowing for direct implementation in Monte-Carlo codes.
We consider a Higgs boson coupled to gluons via the five-dimensional effective operator H tr G_{μν}G^{μν}. We treat H as the real part of a complex field phi that couples to the selfdual gluon field strengths and compute the one-loop corrections to the phi-MHV amplitudes involving phi, two negative helicity gluons and an arbitrary number of positive helicity gluons. Our results generalise earlier work where the two negative helicity gluons were constrained to be colour adjacent. We use four-dimensional unitarity to construct the cut-containing contributions and the recently developed recursion…
