QED 四光子振幅已被许多作者深入研究，其在壳情形在许多教科书中有论述。然而，尽管该振幅在许多不同情境下作为子过程出现，无论是在真空中还是部分光子连接到外场，目前仍缺乏所有四个光子均离壳的计算。本文是四部曲系列的第一篇，我们使用世界线形式化（worldline formalism）明确地以超几何函数及其导数的形式获得该振幅，适用于标量和自旋 QED。该形式化允许我们统一标量和自旋圈计算，避免通常将振幅分解为三个不等价 Feynman 图的做法，并通过 Bern 和 Kosower 最初为胶子振幅引入的分部积分过程的优化版本，在积分核层面实现显式横向性和 UV 有限性。完全置换对称性贯穿始终，振幅自然投影到 Costantini 等人于 1971 年引入的五个张量基上。由于在“四光子盒”的许多应用中，部分光子可取低能极限，且该形式化便于积分掉任何此类腿，除一般运动学情形（第四部分）外，我们还处理一个（第三部分）或两个（第二部分）光子取低能的特殊情形。在本系列第一部分中，我们总结世界线形式化对 N 光子振幅的应用及其与 Feynman 图的关系，推导标量和自旋 QED 中四光子振幅的优化张量分解积分核，并概述第二至第四部分将遵循的计算策略。
英文摘要：
The QED four-photon amplitude has been well-studied by many authors, and on-shell is treated in many textbooks. However, a calculation with all four photons off-shell is presently still lacking, despite of the fact that this amplitude appears off-shell as a subprocess in many different contexts, in vacuum as well as with some photons connecting to external fields. The present paper is the first in a series of four where we use the worldline formalism to obtain this amplitude explicitly in terms of hypergeometric functions, and derivatives thereof, for both scalar and spinor QED. The formalism allows us to unify the scalar and spinor loop calculations, to avoid the usual breaking up of the amplitude into three inequivalent Feynman diagrams, and to achieve manifest transversality as well as UV finiteness at the integrand level by an optimized version of the integration-by-parts procedure originally introduced by Bern and Kosower for gluon amplitudes. The full permutation symmetry is maintained throughout, and the amplitudes get projected naturally into the basis of five tensors introduced by Costantini et al. in 1971. Since in many applications of the "four-photon box" some of the photons can be taken in the low-energy limit, and the formalism makes it easy to integrate out any such leg, apart from the case of general kinematics (part 4) we also treat the special cases of one (part 3) or two (part 2) photons taken at low energy. In this first part of the series, we summarize the application of the worldline formalism to the N-photon amplitudes and its relation to Feynman diagrams, derive the optimized tensor-decomposed integrands of the four-photon amplitudes in scalar and spinor QED, and outline the computational strategy to be followed in parts 2 to 4.
We present the results of analytical calculations of the 3-loop contributions to the asymptotic photon vacuum polarization function, in the on shell scheme, and of the 4-loop contributions to the on shell QED beta-function. These are used to evaluate various 4-loop and 5-loop contributions to the muon anomaly. Our analytical contributions to (g-2)_μdiffer significantly from previous numerical results. A very recent numerical re-evaluation of 4-loop muon-anomaly contributions has yielded results much closer to ours.
Despite its simplicity, the unitary gauge is not a popular choice for practical loop calculations in gauge theories, due to the lack of off-shell renormalizability. We study the renormalization properties of the off-shell Green functions of the elementary electron fields in the massive QED, in order to elucidate the origin and structure of the extra ultraviolet divergences which exist only in the unitary gauge. We find that all these divergences affect the Green functions in a trivial way such that in coordinate space the off-shell Green functions are in fact multiplicatively renormalizable. T…
With the introduction of a spectral representation, the Schwinger-Dyson equation (SDE) for the fermion propagator is formulated in Minkowski space in QED. After imposing the on-shell renormalization conditions, analytic solutions for the fermion propagator spectral functions are obtained in four dimensions with a renormalizable version of the Gauge Technique anzatz for the fermion-photon vertex in the quenched approximation in the Landau gauge. Despite the limitations of this model, having an explicit solution provides a guiding example of the fermion propagator with the correct analytic struc…
We calculate the complete one-loop off-shell three-point scalar-photon vertex in arbitrary gauge and dimension for Scalar Quantum Electrodynamics. Explicit results are presented for the particular cases of dimensions 3 and 4 both for massive and massless scalars. We then propose non-perturbative forms of this vertex that coincide with the perturbative answer to order $e^2$.
In recent work, Gies and Karbstein have discovered that the two-loop Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangians for scalar and spinor QED have non-vanishing reducible contributions in addition to the well-studied irreducible ones. This invalidates previous applications of those Lagrangians to the computation of the two-loop $N$-photon amplitudes in the low energy limit. Here we compute the corrections to those amplitudes due to the reducible contributions.
We derive an explicit formula for the low energy limits of the one-loop, on-shell, massive N-photon amplitudes, for arbitrary N and all helicity assignments, in scalar and spinor QED. The two-loop corrections to the same amplitudes are obtained for up to the ten point case. All photon amplitudes with an odd number of `+' helicities are shown to vanish in this limit to all loop orders.
We investigate generic properties of one-loop amplitudes in unordered gauge theories in four dimensions. For such theories the organisation of amplitudes in manifestly crossing symmetric expressions poses restrictions on their structure and results in remarkable cancellations. We show that one-loop multi-photon amplitudes in QED with at least eight external photons are given only by scalar box integral functions. This QED `no-triangle' property is true for all helicity configurations and has similarities to the `no-triangle' property found in the case of maximal N = 8 supergravity. Results are…
It is explained how first-quantized worldline path integrals can be used as an efficient alternative to Feynman diagrams in the calculation of QED amplitudes and effective actions. The examples include the one-loop photon splitting amplitude, the two-loop Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian, and the one-loop axial vacuum polarization tensor in a general constant electromagnetic field.
We use the pinch technique formalism to construct the gauge-independent off-shell two-loop fermion self-energy, both for Abelian (QED) and non-Abelian (QCD) gauge theories. The new key observation is that all contributions originating from the longitudinal parts of gauge boson propagators, by virtue of the elementary tree-level Ward identities they trigger, give rise to effective vertices, which do not exist in the original Lagrangian; all such vertices cancel diagrammatically inside physical quantities, such as current correlation functions or S-matrix elements. We present two different, but …
Recently it has been shown that the vacuum state in QED is infinitely degenerate. Moreover a transition among the degenerate vacua is induced in any nontrivial scattering process and determined from the associated soft factor. Conventional computations of scattering amplitudes in QED do not account for this vacuum degeneracy and therefore always give zero. This vanishing of all conventional QED amplitudes is usually attributed to infrared divergences. Here we show that if these vacuum transitions are properly accounted for, the resulting amplitudes are nonzero and infrared finite. Our construc…
We apply the worldline formalism to amplitudes in scalar quantum electrodynamics (QED) involving open scalar lines, with an emphasis on their non-perturbative gauge dependence. At the tree-level, we study the scalar propagator interacting with any number of photons in configuration space as well as in momentum space. At one-loop we rederive, in an efficient way, the off-shell vertex in an arbitrary dimension and any covariant gauge. Generalizing the Landau-Khalatnikov-Fradkin transformation (LKFT) for the non-perturbative propagator, we find simple non-perturbative transformation rules for arb…
Three-loop helicity amplitudes of four-lepton scattering in QED
Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, School of Physics and Astronomy The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学物理与天文学学院希格斯理论物理中心）；Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学数学科学系）；Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita di Padova（帕多瓦大学物理与天文系）；INFN, Sezione di Padova（意大利国家核物理研究所帕多瓦分部）
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.
We consider the two-loop four-point amplitude in N=2 super QED, and show that there exists an approximate recursive structure similar to that captured by the ABDK/BDS ansatz for MHV amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills. Furthermore, we present a simple relation between the box coefficients of one-loop photon MHV amplitudes in (super) QED, and sums of box coefficients of one-loop MHV amplitudes in (super) Yang-Mills.
We obtain information on the QED photon amplitudes at high orders in perturbation theory starting from known results on the QED effective Lagrangian in a constant electric field. A closed-form all-order result for the weak field limit of the imaginary part of this Lagrangian has been given years ago by Affleck, Alvarez and Manton (for scalar QED) and by Lebedev and Ritus (for spinor QED). We discuss the evidence for its correctness, and conjecture an analogous formula for the case of a self-dual field. From this extension we then obtain, using Borel analysis, the leading asymptotic growth for …
Massive two-flavor QED_2 is known to have many similarities to the two-flavor QCD_4. Here we compare the π-πscattering amplitudes (actually an analog process in QED_2) of the two theories. The QED_2 amplitude is computed from the bosonized version of the model while the QCD_4 amplitude is computed from an effective low energy chiral Lagrangian. A number of interesting features are noted. For example, the contribution of the two-dimensional Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) term in QED_2 is structurally identical to the vector meson exchange contribution in QCD_4. Also it is shown that the QED_2 amplitu…
We describe the origins of recurrence relations between field theory amplitudes in terms of the construction of Feynman diagrams. In application we derive recurrence relations for the amplitudes of QED which hold to all loop orders and for all combinations of external particles. These results may also be derived from the Schwinger-Dyson equations.
Instability in the scalar channel of the fermion-antifermion scattering amplitude in massless QED_3 for number of flavours less than the critical value 128/3π^2 is demonstrated. The anomalous dimensions of gauge-invariant composite operators are determined to O(1/N). Exponentiation of the O(1/N) infrared logarithm is explicitly demonstrated by evaluating the contribution of the ladder diagrams.
The amplitudes of purely photonic and photon{2-fermion processes of non- commutative QED (NCQED) are derived for different helicity configurations of photons. The basic ingredient is the NCQED counterpart of Yang-Mills recursion relations by means of Berends and Giele. The explicit solutions of recursion relations for NCQED photonic processes with special helicity configurations are presented.
The Cachazo-He-Yuan (CHY) formula for on-shell scattering amplitudes are extended off-shell. The off-shell amplitudes are Möbius invariant, and have the same momentum poles as the on-shell amplitudes. The same technique is also used to obtain off-shell massive scalar and vector boson amplitudes.
Vacuum birefringence is governed by the amplitude for a photon to flip helicity or polarisation state in an external field. Here we calculate the flip and non-flip amplitudes in arbitrary plane wave backgrounds, along with the induced spacetime-dependent refractive indices of the vacuum. We compare the behaviour of the amplitudes in the low energy and high energy regimes, and analyse the impact of pulse shape and energy. We also provide the first lightfront-QED derivation of the coefficients in the Heisenberg-Euler effective action.
This is a personal recollection of several results related to the study of the high energy limit of scattering amplitudes in gravitational theories. They would not have been possible without the encouragement and constant support from Lev Nikolaevich Lipatov.
We present calculations of Casimir energy (CE) in a system of quantized electromagnetic (EM) field interacting with an infinite circular cylindrical shell (which we call `the defect'). Interaction is described in the only QFT-consistent way by Chern-Simon action concentrated on the defect, with a single coupling constant $a$. For regularization of UV divergencies of the theory we use % physically motivated Pauli-Villars regularization of the free EM action. The divergencies are extracted as a polynomial in regularization mass $M$, and they renormalize classical part of the surface action. We r…
The exact $q\bar{q}$ Bethe-Salpeter bound state amplitude is investigated in the space of relative energy $E$ for fixed value of relative position. By means of approximate analysis it is shown to possess singularities in $E$ whenever one of the quarks reaches the energy threshold for the creation of certain number of Schwinger bosons. These results are afterwards confirmed by numerical plots.
Among 12672 Feynman diagrams contributing to the electron anomalous magnetic moment at the tenth order, 6354 are the diagrams having no lepton loops, i.e., those of quenched type. Because the renormalization structure of these diagrams is very complicated, some automation scheme is inevitable to calculate them. We developed an algorithm to write down FORTRAN programs for numerical evaluation of these diagrams, where the necessary counterterms to subtract out ultraviolet subdivergence are generated according to Zimmermann's forest formula. Thus far we have evaluated crudely integrals of 2232 te…
In this paper we consider tree-level gauge invariant off-shell amplitudes (Wilson line form factors) in $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM. For the off-shell amplitudes with one leg off-shell we present a conjecture for their Grassmannian integral representation in spinor helicity, twistor and momentum twistor parameterizations. The presented conjecture is successfully checked against BCFW results for MHV$_n$, NMHV$_4$ and NMHV$_5$ off-shell amplitudes. We have also verified that our Grassmannian integral representation correctly reproduces soft (on-shell) limit for the off-shell gluon momentum. It is shown …
We introduce a manifestly little group covariant on-shell superspace for massive particles in four dimensions using the massive spinor helicity formalism. This enables us to construct massive on-shell superfields and fully utilize on-shell symmetry considerations to derive all possible $\mathcal{N}=1$ three-particle amplitudes for particles of spin as high as one, as well as some simple amplitudes for particles of any spin. Throughout, the conceptual and computational simplicity of this approach is exhibited.
We review some of the modern approaches to scattering amplitude computations in QCD and their application to precision LHC phenomenology. We emphasise the usefulness of momentum twistor variables in parameterising general amplitudes.
We present an overview of recent developments, based on on-shell techniques, in the calculation of multi-parton scattering amplitudes at one loop that are relevant for phenomenological studies at hadron colliders. These new on-shell methods make efficient use of the physical properties of the hard scattering, such as unitarity and factorization.
We perform a comprehensive study of on-shell recursion relations for Born amplitudes in spontaneously broken gauge theories and identify the minimal shifts required to construct amplitudes with a given particle content and spin quantum numbers. We show that two-line or three-line shifts are sufficient to construct all amplitudes with five or more particles, apart from amplitudes involving longitudinal vector bosons or scalars, which may require at most five-line shifts. As an application, we revisit selection rules for multi-boson amplitudes using on-shell recursion and little-group transforma…
In the application of on-shell recursion relation to string amplitudes, one challenge is the sum over infinite intermediate on-shell string states. In this note, we show how to sum these infinite states explicitly by including unphysical states to make complete Fock space.
We present the analytic evaluation of the two-loop corrections to the amplitude for the scattering of four fermions in Quantum Electrodynamics, $f^- + f^+ + F^- + F^+ \to 0$, with $f$ and $F$ representing a massless and a massive lepton, respectively. Dimensional regularization is employed to evaluate the loop integrals. Ultraviolet divergences are removed by renormalizing the coupling constant in the ${\overline{\text{MS}}}$-scheme, and the lepton mass as well as the external fields in the on-shell scheme. The analytic result for the renormalized amplitude is expressed as Laurent series aroun…
An update is given on our long-term effort to perform a three-loop check on the Affleck-Alvarez-Manton/Lebedev-Ritus exponentiation conjecture for the imaginary part of the Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian, using 1+1 dimensional QED as a toy model. After reviewing the history and significance of the conjecture, we present trigonometric integral representations for the single electron loop contributions to the three-loop Lagrangian, and develop a symmetry-based method for the calculation of their weak-field expansion coefficients.
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.
Massless-Massive Amplitude Correspondence I: Helicity-chirality Matching and On-shell Higgsing
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院理论物理研究所）；School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学物理科学学院）；Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, UCAS（中国科学院大学杭州高等研究院）；International Center for Theoretical Physics Asia-Pacific（亚太理论物理中心）；Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory are independent of the field parameterization, which has a natural geometric interpretation as a form of `coordinate invariance.' Amplitudes can be expressed in terms of Riemannian curvature tensors, which makes the covariance of amplitudes under non-derivative field redefinitions manifest. We present a generalized geometric framework that extends this manifest covariance to $all$ allowed field redefinitions. Amplitudes satisfy a recursion relation that closely resembles the application of covariant derivatives to increase the rank of a tensor. Thi…
We study the three-particle and four-particle scattering amplitudes for an arbitrary, finite number of massive scalars, spinors and vectors by employing the on-shell massive spinor formalism. We consider the most general three-particle amplitudes with energy growing behavior at most of $\mathcal{O} (E)$. This is the special case of the requirement of tree unitarity, which states that the $N$-particle scattering amplitudes at tree-level should grow at most as $\mathcal{O} (E^{4-N})$ in the high energy hard scattering limit, i.e. at fixed non-zero angles. Then the factorizable parts of the four-…
We extend a previously developed approach to relate thermal currents in the high temperature regime and classical limits of amplitudes. We consider the bi-adjoint scalar theory, which has the basic structure of a cubic theory and which is related to QCD and gravity through the double copy. In addition, we consider a generalization of scalar QED to model classical spin, where massive scalars are complex higher-spin fields. We derive Vlasov-type kinetic equations for bi-adjoint scalars and study their iterative solutions, while for QED we use well-known kinetic equations. In both cases we find c…
We derive the local, covariant, continuous, anticommuting and off-shell nilpotent (anti-)BRST symmetry transformations for the interacting U(1) gauge theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in the framework of augmented superfield approach to BRST formalism. In addition to the horizontality condition, we invoke another gauge invariant condition on the six (4, 2)-dimensional supermanifold to obtain the exact and unique nilpotent symmetry transformations for all the basic fields, present in the (anti-)BRST invariant Lagrangian density of the physical four (3 + 1)-dimensional QED. The above super…
We construct the de Sitter QED in Coulomb gauge assuming that the quantum modes are prepared by a global apparatus which is able to determine a stable and invariant vacuum state, independent on the local coordinates. Then we proceed in traditional manner postulating the appropriate equal-time commutators and anti-commutators of the interacting fields and deriving the perturbation expansion of the scattering operator. In this approach the $in -out$ transitions amplitudes, measured by the same global apparatus, can be calculated exactly by using the reduction formalism and the perturbation proce…
We construct Faddeev-Kulish states in QED and perturbative quantum gravity to subleading order in the soft momentum expansion and to first order in the coupling constant, using the charge conservation formula of asymptotic symmetries associated with the tree-level subleading soft theorems. We demonstrate that the emission and absorption of soft photons/gravitons in dressed amplitudes vanish. The fact that no additional soft radiation may be added to a dressed amplitude supports the claim that, in the dressed state formalism, the soft and hard sectors of scattering processes are correlated. We …
We compute off-shell three- and four-tachyon amplitudes at tree level by using a prescription based on the requirement of projective invariance. In particular we show that the off-shell four-tachyon amplitude can be put in the same form as the corresponding on-shell one, exhibiting therefore the same analyticity properties. This is shown both for the bosonic and the fermionic string. The result obtained in the latter case can be extended to the off-shell four-tachyon amplitude in type 0 theory.
The finding of an explicit effective action describing amplitude of photon triple splitting is investigated through Krein space quantization and quantum metric fluctuation. Using the derivative expansion method, the one-loop radiative corrections from Lorentz- and CPT- violating extended Krein QED shows that it is not possible to find a nonzero effective action.
The effective Lagrangian of QED coupled to dyons is calculated. The resulting generalization of the Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian contains non-linear $P$- and $T$-nonivariant (but $C$ invariant) terms corresponding to the virtual pair creation of dyons. As examples, the amplitudes for photon splitting and photon coalescence are calculated.
