We propose and prove a new formula for the one-loop all same helicity Yang-Mills amplitudes. These amplitudes are seen to arise as a sum of products of two tree-level Berends-Giele currents connected by an effective propagator. To make sense of the propagators one needs to introduce the so-called region, or dual momenta. The formula is proven by observing that it readily implies the correct collinear limit properties. The only non-trivial part of the proof is establishing that our formula for the amplitude is invariant under shifts of the region momenta.
We present an analytic expression for the six-point all-plus helicity amplitude in QCD at two-loops. We compute the rational terms in a compact analytic form organised by their singularity structure.
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.
I review some recent work that describes the close analogy between self-dual Yang--Mills amplitudes and QCD amplitudes with external gluons of positive helicity. This analogy is carried at tree level for amplitudes with two external quarks and up to one-loop for amplitudes involving only external gluons.
We study contact four-point amplitudes in the spinor-helicity formalism in anti-de Sitter space. We find that these amplitudes can be brought to an especially simple form, which we call canonical. Next, we classify consistent contact amplitudes by requiring correct transformation properties with respect to the AdS isometry algebra. Finally, we establish a connection between the canonical form of AdS amplitudes and scalar multi-trace conformal primaries in flat space.
Using the novel diagrammatic rules recently proposed by Cachazo, Svrcek, and Witten, I give a compact, manifestly Lorentz-invariant form for tree-level gauge-theory amplitudes with three opposite helicities.
We construct an expression for the n-point one-loop graviton scattering amplitude with a single negative helicity external leg using an augmented recursion technique. We analyse the soft-limits of these amplitudes and demonstrate that they have soft behaviour beyond the conjectured universal behaviour.
Lecture notes on Poincaré-invariant scattering amplitudes and tree-level recursion relations in spinor-helicity formalism. We illustrate the non-perturbative constraints imposed over on-shell amplitudes by the Lorentz Little Group, and review how they completely fix the three-point amplitude involving either massless or massive particles. Then we present an introduction to tree-level BCFW recursion relations, and some applications for massless scattering, where the derived three-point amplitudes are employed.
We evaluate all split helicity gluon tree amplitudes in open twistor string theory. We show that these amplitudes satisfy the BCFW recurrence relations restricted to the split helicity case and, hence, that these amplitudes agree with those of gauge theory. To do this we make a particular choice of the sextic constraints in the link variables that determine the poles contributing to the contour integral expression for the amplitudes. Using the residue theorem to re-express this integral in terms of contributions from poles at rational values of the link variables, which we determine, we evalua…
I show that helicity plays an important role in the development of rules for computing higher loop effective Lagrangians. Specifically, the two-loop Heisenberg-Euler effective Lagrangian in quantum electrodynamics is remarkably simple when the background field has definite helicity (i.e., is self-dual). Furthermore, the two-loop answer can be derived essentially algebraically, and is naturally expressed in terms of one-loop quantities. This represents a generalization of the familiar ``integration-by-parts'' rules for manipulating diagrams involving free propagators to the more complicated cas…
We re-compute the recently derived two-loop five-point all plus Yang-Mills amplitude using Unitarity and Recursion. Recursion requires augmented recursion to determine the sub-leading pole. Using these methods the simplicity of this amplitude is understood.
We study all tree-level split helicity gluon amplitudes by using the recently proposed BCFW recursion relation and Hodges diagrams in ambitwistor space. We pick out the contributing diagrams and find that all of them can be divided into triangles in a suitable way. We give the explicit expressions for all of these amplitudes. As an example, we reproduce the six gluon split NMHV amplitudes in momentum space.
We detail the calculation of two-loop all-plus helicity amplitudes for pure Yang-Mills theory. The four dimensional unitarity methods and augmented recursion techniques we have developed, together with a knowledge of the singular structure of the amplitudes allow us to compute these in compact analytic forms. Specifically we present the computation and analytic results for the six- and seven-gluon leading colour two-loop amplitudes these being the first QCD two-loop amplitudes beyond five-points.
We give a new formalism for pure gauge-theoretic scattering at tree-amplitude level. We first describe a generalization of the Britto-Cachazo-Feng recursion relation in which a significant restriction is removed. We then use twistor diagrams to express all tree amplitudes in a form independent of helicity. A formal procedure involving anticommuting elements is required. We illustrate the results with specific calculations of interest, up to 8 interacting fields.
We extend the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) for scattering amplitudes in planar N=4 SYM to account for all possible helicities of the external states. This is done by constructing a simple map between helicity configurations and so-called charged pentagon transitions. These OPE building blocks are generalizations of the bosonic pentagons entering MHV amplitudes and they can be bootstrapped at finite coupling from the integrable dynamics of the color flux tube. A byproduct of our map is a simple realization of parity in the super Wilson loop picture.
It has been suggested a long time ago by W. Bardeen that non-vanishing of the one-loop same helicity YM amplitudes, in particular such an amplitude at four points, should be interpreted as an anomaly. However, the available derivations of these amplitudes are rather far from supporting this interpretation in that they share no similarity whatsoever with the standard triangle diagram chiral anomaly calculation. We provide a new computation of the same helicity four-point amplitude by a method designed to mimic the chiral anomaly derivation. This is done by using the momentum conservation to rew…
In planar N=4 SYM we study a particular class of helicity preserving amplitudes. These are scalar amplitudes whose flavor configuration is chosen in such a way that only a limited number of diagrams is allowed, which exhibit an iterative structure. For such amplitudes we evaluate the tree level and one-loop contributions, providing a general formula valid for any number of particles. The ratio between the one-loop and tree level results is a simple combination of dual conformally invariant box functions with at most two massive legs. Along with the MHV and NMHV series, this constitutes the thi…
We present an ansatz for all one-loop amplitudes in pure Einstein gravity for which the n external gravitons have the same outgoing helicity. These loop amplitudes, which are rational functions of the momenta, also arise in the quantization of self-dual gravity in four-dimensional Minkowski space. Our ansatz agrees with explicit computations via D-dimensional unitarity cuts for n less than or equal to 6. It also has the expected analytic behavior, for all n, as a graviton becomes soft, and as two momenta become collinear. The gravity results are closely related to analogous amplitudes in (self…
We give the light-cone gauge calculation of the one-loop on-shell scattering amplitudes for gluon-gluon scattering which violate helicity conservation. We regulate infrared divergences by discretizing the p^+ integrations, omitting the terms with p^+=0. Collinear divergences are absent diagram by diagram for the helicity non-conserving amplitudes. We also employ a novel ultraviolet regulator that is natural for the light-cone worldsheet description of planar Feynman diagrams. We show that these regulators give the known answers for the helicity non-conserving one-loop amplitudes, which don't s…
We make an explicit link between the cubic interactions of off-shell fields and the on-shell three-point amplitudes in four dimensions. Both the cubic interactions and the on-shell three-point amplitudes had been independently classified in the literature, but their relation has not been made explicit. The aim of this note is to provide such a relation and discuss similarities and differences of their constructions. For the completeness of our analysis, we also derive the covariant form of all parity-odd massless vertices.
All positive helicity four-point gluon-graviton amplitudes in Einstein-Yang-Mills theory coupled to a dilaton and axion field are computed at the leading one-loop order using colour-kinematics duality. In particular, all relevant contributions in the gravitational and gauge coupling are established. This extends a previous generalized unitarity based computation beyond the leading terms in the gravitational coupling $κ$. The resulting purely rational expressions take very compact forms. The previously seen vanishing of the single-graviton-three-gluon amplitude at leading order in $κ$ is seen t…
We compute the non-MHV one-loop seven-gluon amplitudes in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, which contain three negative-helicity gluons and four positive-helicity gluons. There are four independent color-ordered amplitudes, (- - - + + + +), (- - + - + + +), (- - + + -+ +) and (- + - + - + +). The MHV amplitudes containing two negative-helicity and five positive-helicity gluons were computed previously, so all independent one-loop seven-gluon helicity amplitudes are now known for this theory. We present partial information about an infinite sequence of next-to-MHV one-loop helicity amplitudes, with…
We study BPS dominated loop amplitudes in M-theory on T^2. For this purpose we generalize the concept of helicity supertraces to nine spacetime dimensions. These traces distinguish between various massive supermultiplets and appear as coefficients in their one-loop contributions to n-graviton scattering amplitudes. This can be used to show that only ultrashort BPS multiplets contribute to the R^4 term in the effective action, which was first computed by Green, Gutperle and Vanhove. There are two inequivalent ultrashort BPS multiplets which describe the Kaluza-Klein states and the wrapped membr…
We present the general flux tube integrand for MHV and non-MHV amplitudes, in planar N = 4 SYM theory, up to a group theoretical rational factor. We find that the MHV and non-MHV cases only differ by simple form factors which we derive. This information allows us to run the operator product expansion program for all sorts of non-MHV amplitudes and to test the recently proposed map with the so called charged pentagons transitions. Perfect agreement is found, on a large sample of non-MHV amplitudes, with the perturbative data available in the literature.
We study the consistency conditions for interactions of massless fields of any spin in four-dimensional flat space using the light-cone approach. We show that they can be equivalently rewritten as the Ward identities for the off-shell light-cone amplitudes built from the light-cone Hamiltonian in the standard way. Then we find a general solution of these Ward identities. The solution admits a compact representation when written in the spinor-helicity form and is given by an arbitrary function of spinor products, satisfying well-known homogeneity constraints. Thus, we show that the light-cone c…
We review an algorithm for determining the branch points of general amplitudes in planar $\mathcal{N}=4$ super-Yang-Mills theory from amplituhedra. We demonstrate how to use the recent reformulation of amplituhedra in terms of `sign flips' in order to streamline the application of this algorithm to amplitudes of any helicity. In this way we recover the known branch points of all one-loop amplitudes, and we find an `emergent positivity' on boundaries of amplituhedra.
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 compute the next-to-MHV one-loop n-gluon amplitudes in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory. These amplitudes contain three negative-helicity gluons and an arbitrary number of positive-helicity gluons, and are the first infinite series of amplitudes beyond the simplest, MHV, amplitudes. We also discuss some aspects of their twistor-space structure.
We present a method for building physical projector operators for multi-leg helicity amplitudes. For any helicity configuration of the external particles, we define a physical projector which singles out the corresponding helicity amplitude. For processes with more than four external legs, these physical projectors depend on significantly fewer tensor structures and exhibit a remarkable simplicity compared with projector operators defined with traditional approaches. As an example, we present analytic formulas for a complete set of projectors for five-gluon scattering. These have been validate…
We calculate the complete set of two-loop leading-colour QCD helicity amplitudes for $γγj$-production at hadron colliders. Our results are presented in a compact, fully-analytical form.
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.
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.
The novel massive spinor-helicity formalism of Arkani-Hamed, Huang and Huang provides an elegant way to calculate scattering amplitudes in quantum chromodynamics for arbitrary quark spin projections. In this note we compute two families of tree-level QCD amplitudes with one massive quark pair and n-2 gluons. The two cases include all gluons with identical helicity and one opposite-helicity gluon being color-adjacent to one of the quarks. Our results naturally incorporate the previously known amplitudes for both quark spins quantized along one of the gluonic momenta. In the all-multiplicity for…
We examine interacting Abelian theories at low energies and show that holomorphically normalized photon helicity amplitudes transform into dual amplitudes under SL(2,Z) as modular forms with weights that depend on the number of positive and negative helicity photons and on the number of internal photon lines. Moreover, canonically normalized helicity amplitudes transform by a phase, so that even though the amplitudes are not duality invariant, their squares are duality invariant. We explicitly verify the duality transformation at one loop by comparing the amplitudes in the case of an electron …
We present the two-loop pure gauge contribution to the gluon-gluon scattering amplitude with maximal helicity violation. Our construction of the amplitude does not rely directly on Feynman diagrams, but instead uses its analytic properties in 4 - 2 epsilon dimensions. We evaluate the loop integrals appearing in the amplitude through O(epsilon^0) in terms of polylogarithms.
The spinor-helicity formalism has become an invaluable tool for understanding the S-matrix of massless particles in four dimensions. In this paper we construct a spinor-helicity formalism in six dimensions, and apply it to derive compact expressions for the three, four and five point tree amplitudes of Yang-Mills theory. Using the KLT relations, it is a straightforward process to obtain amplitudes in linearized gravity from these Yang-Mills amplitudes; we demonstrate this by writing down the gravitational three and four point amplitudes. Because there is no conserved helicity in six dimensions…
We present a prescription to calculate manifestly gauge invariant tree-level helicity amplitudes for arbitrary scattering processes with off-shell initial-state gluons within the kinematics of high-energy scattering. We show that it is equivalent to Lipatov's effective action approach, and show its computational potential through numerical calculations for scattering processes with several particles in the final state.
We present a calculation of the helicity amplitudes for the process $gg\toγγ$ in three-loop massless QCD. We employ a recently proposed method to calculate scattering amplitudes in the 't Hooft-Veltman scheme that reduces the amount of spurious non-physical information needed at intermediate stages of the computation. Our analytic results for the three-loop helicity amplitudes are remarkably compact, and can be efficiently evaluated numerically. This calculation provides the last missing building block for the computation of NNLO QCD corrections to diphoton production in gluon fusion.
We present a conjecture for the $n$-gluon one-loop amplitudes with maximal helicity violation. The conjecture emerges from the powerful requirement that the amplitudes have the correct behavior in the collinear limits of external momenta. One implication is that the corresponding amplitudes where three or more gluon legs are replaced by photons vanish for $n>4$.
One-loop maximal helicity violating (MHV) amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills (SYM) theories are analyzed, using the prescription of Cachazo, Svrcek, and Witten (CSW). The relations between leading N_c amplitudes A_{n;1} and sub-leading amplitudes A_{n;c} obtained by the CSW prescription are found to be identical to those obtained from conventional field theory calculations. Combining with existing results, this establishes the validity of the CSW prescription to one-loop in the calculation of MHV amplitudes in N=4 SYM theories of finite N_c.
We present the two-loop leading colour QCD helicity amplitudes for the process $pp\to W(\to lν)γ+j$. We implement a complete reduction of the amplitudes, including the leptonic decay of the $W$-boson, using finite field arithmetic, and extract the analytic finite remainders using a recently identified basis of special functions. Simplified analytic expressions are obtained after considering permutations of a rational kinematic parametrisation and multivariate partial fractioning. We demonstrate efficient numerical evaluation of the two-loop colour and helicity summed finite remainders for phys…
We present a compact analytic expression for the leading colour two-loop five-gluon amplitude in Yang-Mills theory with a single negative helicity and four positive helicities. The analytic result is reconstructed from numerical evaluations over finite fields. The numerical method combines integrand reduction, integration-by-parts identities and Laurent expansion into a basis of pentagon functions to compute the coefficients directly from six-dimensional generalised unitarity cuts.
We compute the three-loop helicity amplitudes for $q\bar{q} \to gg$ and its crossed partonic channels, in massless QCD. Our analytical results provide a non-trivial check of the color quadrupole contribution to the infrared poles for external states in different color representations. At high energies, the $qg \to qg$ amplitude shows the predicted factorized form from Regge theory and confirms previous results for the gluon Regge trajectory extracted from $qq' \to qq'$ and $gg \to gg$ scattering.
The spinor-helicity formalism has proven to be very efficient in the calculation of scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory, while the loop tree duality (LTD) representation of multi-loop integrals exhibits appealing and interesting advantages with respect to other approaches. In view of the most recent developments in LTD, we exploit the synergies with the spinor-helicity formalism to analyse illustrative one- and two-loop scattering processes. We focus our discussion on the local UV renormalisation of IR and UV finite amplitudes and present a fully automated numerical implementation th…
A scalar cubic action that classically reproduces the self-dual Yang--Mills equations is shown to generate one-loop QCD amplitudes for external gluon all with the same helicity. This result is related to the symmetries of the self-dual Yang--Mills equations.
Virtual two-loop corrections to scattering amplitudes are a key ingredient to precision physics at collider experiments. We compute the full set of planar master integrals relevant to five-point functions in massless QCD, and use these to derive an analytical expression for the two-loop five-gluon all-plus-helicity amplitude. After subtracting terms that are related to the universal infrared and ultraviolet pole structure, we obtain a remarkably simple and compact finite remainder function, consisting only of dilogarithms.
We present a complete set of analytic helicity amplitudes for top quark pair production via gluon fusion at two-loops in QCD. For the first time, we include corrections due to massive fermion loops which give rise to integrals over elliptic curves. We present the results of the missing master integrals needed to compute the amplitude and obtain an analytic form for the finite remainders in terms of iterated integrals using rationalised kinematics and finite field sampling. We also study the numerical evaluation of the iterated integrals.
After a rediscussion of the vanishing theorems for helicity amplitudes in unbroken gauge theories, we study the case of spontaneously broken gauge theories at high energy. The vanishing theorems generalize to a definite pattern of m/E-suppression of the amplitudes that vanish in the massless case, where E is the energy scale of the process and m is the mass of the gauge vectors. We use only elementary arguments, and as an application we show how these methods can be employed to understand some aspects of the effective W approximation in the polarized case.
We calculate all planar contributions to the two-loop massless helicity amplitudes for the process $q\bar q\to γγγ$. The results are presented in fully analytic form in terms of the functional basis proposed recently by Chicherin and Sotnikov. With this publication we provide the two-loop contributions already used by us in the NNLO QCD calculation of the LHC process $pp\to γγγ$ [Chawdhry et al. (2019)]. Our results agree with a recent calculation of the same amplitude [Abreu et al. (2020)] which was performed using different techniques. We combine several modern computational techniques, nota…
We present the first numerical results for the two-loop helicity amplitudes for the scattering of four partons and a W-boson in QCD. We use a finite field sampling method to reduce directly from Feynman diagrams to the coefficients of a set of master integrals after applying integration-by-parts identities. Since the basis of master integrals is not yet fully known analytically, we identify a set of master integrals with a simple divergence structure using local numerator insertions. This allows for accurate numerical evaluation of the amplitude using sector decomposition methods.
We obtain simple expressions for tree-level maximally helicity violating amplitudes of N gauge bosons from disk world-sheets of open superstrings. The amplitudes are written in terms of (N-3)! hypergeometric integrals depending on kinematic parameters, weighted by certain kinematic factors. The integrals are transcendental in a strict sense defined in this work. The respective kinematic factors can be succinctly written in terms of "dual" momentum twistors. The amplitudes are computed by using the prescription proposed by Berkovits and Maldacena.
We present the master integrals relevant for computing the complete set of leading-colour analytic helicity amplitudes for top-quark pair production via gluon fusion at two-loops in QCD. We include corrections due to massive fermion loops which give rise to integrals involving elliptic curves. We also elaborate on the structure of singularities that play an important role in the numerical evaluation of the iterated integrals and their analytic continuation.
