We compute amplitudes for the process $g^* g^* \to q \overline q V^*$ (two virtual gluons into a quark, antiquark and a boson) at the tree level using the spinor-helicity formalism. The resulting analytic expressions are much shorter than squared amplitudes obtained using trace methods. Our results can be used to expedite numerical calculations in phenomenological studies of the Drell-Yan process in high energy factorization framework.
In this work, the library spinney is presented, which provides an implementation of helicity spinors and related algorithms for the symbolical manipulation program Form. The package is well suited for symbolic amplitude calculations both in traditional, Feynman diagram based approaches and unitarity-based techniques.
Methods to apply the spinor helicity technique and string reorganization to multiloop amplitudes using the Feynman- and Schwinger-parameter representations are reviewed and expanded.
The success of the spinor helicity technique for tree processes is reviewed. To apply it to multiloop diagrams one is naturally led to the Schwinger proper-time representation, whose properties are discussed. This representation also serves as a useful link between field theories and string theories.
Manifestly Lorentz covariant Feynman rules are given in terms of a "scalar" field for each helicity, dramatically simplifying the calculation of amplitudes with massless particles. The spinor helicity formalism is properly identified as a null complex spacelike (not lightlike) gauge, where two massless external momenta define the reference frame. Usually this gauge is applied only to external line factors; we extend this method to vertices and propagators by modifying the action itself using lightcone methods.
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 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 present a systematic procedure to compute complete, analytic form factors of gauge-invariant operators at loop level in pure Yang-Mills. We consider applications to operators of the form $\mathrm{Tr}\, F^n$ where $F$ is the gluon field strength. Our approach is based on an extension to form factors of the dimensional reconstruction technique, in conjunction with the six-dimensional spinor-helicity formalism and generalised unitarity. For form factors this technique requires the introduction of additional scalar operators, for which we provide a systematic prescription. We also discuss a gen…
We present SpinorsExtras package implementing massive spinor-helicity formalism in Mathematica on top of S@M package. Package defines new objects for Mathematica - massive spinors and reference, associated and polarization vectors. Various properties of introduced symbols and relations among them are implemented together with functions to manipulate and interchange such objects. The package can be used for symbolic calculation of helicity amplitudes involving massive particles with real or complex momenta, using on- or off-shell recursive techniques or Feynman diagrams.
In this paper we present the package S@M (Spinors@Mathematica) which implements the spinor-helicity formalism in Mathematica. The package allows the use of complex-spinor algebra along with the multi-purpose features of Mathematica. The package defines the spinor objects with their basic properties along with functions to manipulate them. It also offers the possibility of evaluating the spinorial objects numerically at every computational step. The package is therefore well suited to be used in the context of on-shell technology, in particular for the evaluation of scattering amplitudes at tre…
We use the spinor helicity formalism to calculate the cross section for production of three partons of a given polarization in Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) off proton and nucleus targets at small Bjorken x. The target proton or nucleus is treated as a classical color field (shock wave) from which the produced partons scatter multiple times. We reported our result for the final expression for the production cross section and studied the azimuthal angular correlations of the produced partons in [1]. Here we provide the full details of the calculation of the production cross section using the …
An helicity formalism for perturbative calculations is presented. It is based on the formal insertion in spinor lines of a complete set of states built up with unphysical spinors. It is particularly convenient when massive spinors are present. Its application to $e^+\,e^-\,\rightarrow b\,\bar b\,W^+W^-$ is briefly discussed.
In this article, we extend the %Weyl-van der Waerden spinor technique for calculating helicity amplitudes to general massive fields of half-integer spins. We find that the little group generators can be represented as first-order differential operators in the spinor formalism. We use the spinor forms of the generators to get the explicit form of the massive fields of any spin and any helicity. We also deal with the three-particle S-matrix by these spinor form generators, and find that we are able to extend the explicit form of the three-particle vertex obtained by Benincasa and Cachazo to the …
Massive On-shell Splitting Functions in Spinor-Helicity Formalism
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）；School of Fundamental Physics and Mathematical Sciences, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, UCAS（杭州高等研究院基础物理与数学学院）；International Centre for Theoretical Physics Asia-Pacific（亚太地区理论物理中心）
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…
We show that a natural spinor-helicity formalism that can describe massive scattering amplitudes exists in $D=6$ dimensions. This is arranged by having helicity spinors carry an index in the Dirac spinor {\bf 4} of the massive little group, $SO(5) \sim Sp(4)$. In the high energy limit, two separate kinds of massless helicity spinors emerge as required for consistency with arXiv:0902.0981, with indices in the two $SU(2)$'s of the massless little group $SO(4)$. The tensors of ${\bf 4}$ lead to particles with arbitrary spin, and using these and demanding consistent factorization, we can fix $3-$ …
We propose a new helicity formalism based on the formal insertion in spinor lines of a complete set of states build up with unphysical spinors. The method is developed both for massless and massive fermions for which it turns out to be particularly fast. All relevant formulae are given.
Inspired by the flow description of su(N) colour calculations, we recently showed how to simplify the spinor-helicity formalism (at the algebra level two copies of complexified su(2)) by treating each Weyl spinor as part of a flow line with definite chirality and momentum. This formalism, dubbed the chirality-flow formalism, eliminates all non-trivial algebra from tree-level spinor-helicity calculations, thus allowing the shortest possible route from Feynman diagrams to complex numbers (spinor inner products). In this presentation, we briefly introduce the main features of this method and show…
We present a method for symbolic evaluation of Feynman amplitudes. We construct special polarization basis for spinor particles which produces compact expressions for tensor products of basis spinors.
Methods of spinor calculus in particle physics are described in this series of four chapters written in french. A special emphasis is made on the well-known helicity-coupling scheme which is the guiding thread of all these methods. Numerous explicit formulas are given for projectors onto two-particles helicity states as well as for bilinears of Dirac spinors, for the s and t channels of a given two-body process involving spin 1/2 particles. In the last chapter, applications to various elementary processes are given.
Two-component spinors are the basic ingredients for describing fermions in quantum field theory in four space-time dimensions. We develop and review the techniques of the two-component spinor formalism and provide a complete set of Feynman rules for fermions using two-component spinor notation. These rules are suitable for practical calculations of cross-sections, decay rates, and radiative corrections in the Standard Model and its extensions, including supersymmetry, and many explicit examples are provided. The unified treatment presented in this review applies to massless Weyl fermions and m…
Starting from a one-body front-form equation with Lepage-Brodsky spinors we show, with a fair amount of new technology, how an integral equation in standard momentum space with Bjorken-Drell spinors can be obtained. The integral equation decouples for singlets and triplets.
We show that, for both scalar and spinor QED, the two-loop Euler-Heisenberg effective Lagrangian for a constant Euclidean self-dual background has an extremely simple closed-form expression in terms of the digamma function. Moreover, the scalar and spinor QED effective Lagrangians are very similar to one another. These results are dramatic simplifications compared to the results for other backgrounds. We apply them to a calculation of the low energy limits of the two-loop massive N-photon `all +' helicity amplitudes. The simplicity of our results can be related to the connection between self-d…
We establish a simple formula for the minimal dimension of operators leading to any helicity amplitude. It eases the systematic enumeration of independent operators from the construction of massless non-factorizable on-shell amplitudes. Little-group constraints can then be solved algorithmically for each helicity configuration to extract a complete set of spinor structures with lowest dimension. Occasionally, further reduction using momentum conservation, on-shell conditions and Schouten identities is required. A systematic procedure to account for the latter is presented. Dressing spinor stru…
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 derive local kinematic numerators for gauge theory tree amplitudes which manifestly satisfy Jacobi identities analogous to color factors. They naturally emerge from the low energy limit of superstring amplitudes computed with the pure spinor formalism. The manifestation of the color--kinematics duality is a consequence of the superstring computation involving no more than (n-2)! kinematic factors for the full color dressed n-point amplitude. The bosonic part of these results describe gluon scattering independent on the number of supersymmetries and captures any N^kMHV helicity configuration…
We compute the leading probability for a gluon to flip helicity state upon traversing a background plane wave gauge field in pure Yang-Mills theory and QCD, with an arbitrary number of colours and flavours. This is a one-loop calculation in perturbative gauge theory around the gluonic plane wave background, which is treated without approximation (i.e., to all orders in the coupling). We introduce a background-dressed version of the spinor helicity formalism and use it to obtain simple formulae for the flip amplitude with pure external gluon polarizations. We also give in-depth examples for gau…
The entanglement between $SU(2) \otimes SU(2)$ internal degrees of freedom of parity and helicity for reflected and transmitted waves of Dirac-like particles scattered by a potential step along an arbitrary direction on the $x-y$ plane is quantified. Diffusion ($E \geq V$) and Klein zone ($V \geq E$) energy regimes are considered. It has been shown that, for $SU(2) \otimes SU(2)$ polarized structures of helicity eigenstates impinging the barrier, the local interaction with a {\em step} potential destroys the {\em parity-spin} separability. The framework presented here can be straightforwardly …
We study representations of the Poincaré group that have a privileged transformation law along a p-dimensional hyperplane, and uncover their associated spinor helicity variables in D spacetime dimensions. Our novel representations generalize the recently introduced celestial states and transform as conformal primaries of SO(p,1), the symmetry group of the p-hyperplane. We will refer to our generalized states as ``partially celestial." Following Wigner's method, we find the induced representations, including spin degrees of freedom. Defining generalized spinor helicity variables for every D and…
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 consider heavy quark and antiquark off-shell spinorial currents with emission of an arbitrary number of gluons of positive helicity. From this results we calculate the corresponding on-shell scattering amplitude and the quark-antiquark vector current. Then, we show that in the heavy top quark effective theory the holomorfic component of the Higgs $\to q \bar{q} + n$-gluon amplitude vanish for helicity conserving configurations.
We examine multiphoton production in the electroweak sector of the Standard Model in the high energy limit using the equivalence theorem in combination with spinor helicity techniques. We utilize currents consisting of a charged scalar, spinor, or vector line that radiates $n$ photons. Only one end of the charged line is off shell in these currents, which are known for the cases of like-helicity and one unlike-helicity photons. We obtain a wide variety of helicity amplitudes for processes involving two pairs of charged particles by considering combinations of four currents. We examine the situ…
The factorization of multi-leg gauge theory amplitudes in the soft and collinear limits provides strong constraints on the structure of amplitudes, and enables efficient calculations of multi-jet observables at the LHC. There is significant interest in extending this understanding to include subleading powers in the soft and collinear limits. While this has been achieved for low point amplitudes, for higher point functions there is a proliferation of variables and more complicated phase space, making the analysis more challenging. By combining the subleading power expansion of spinor-helicity …
We derive a new class of one-loop non-renormalization theorems that strongly constrain the running of higher dimension operators in a general four-dimensional quantum field theory. Our logic follows from unitarity: cuts of one-loop amplitudes are products of tree amplitudes, so if the latter vanish then so too will the associated divergences. Finiteness is then ensured by simple selection rules that zero out tree amplitudes for certain helicity configurations. For each operator we define holomorphic and anti-holomorphic weights, $(w,\overline w) =(n - h,n+h)$, where $n$ and $h$ are the number …
We compute the two-loop mixed QCD-Electroweak corrections to $q \overline{q} \to H g$ and its crossed channels $q g \to H q$, $\overline{q} g \to H \overline{q}$, limiting ourselves to the contribution of light virtual quarks. We compute the independent helicity amplitudes as well as the form factors for this process, expressing them in terms of hyperlogarithms with algebraic arguments. The Feynman integrals are computed by direct integration over Feynman parameters and the results are expressed in terms of a basis of rational prefactors.
The spinor helicity formalism (SHF) has been efficiently applied to compute perturbative amplitudes in plenty of processes and reactions in gauge theories (including gravity), mostly in the massless case. Some work has been done in order to extend the SHF to the massive case. We have used these powerful tools to evaluate amplitudes in a local supersymmetric model where the gravitino is the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). Two decays have been evaluated in order to show the capability of the SHF in the massive extension, namely the two body neutralino decays $\tildeχ_0\to V\tildeΨ^μ$ wit…
Covariant canonical-spinor amplitudes for partial wave analysis
School of Fundamental Physics and Mathematical Sciences, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, UCAS（杭州高等研究院基础物理与数学学院，UCAS）；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）；International Centre for Theoretical Physics Asia-Pacific（亚太地区理论物理中心）
The Weyl-van-der-Waerden spinor technique for calculating helicity amplitudes of massive and massless particles is presented in a form that is particularly well suited to a direct implementation in computer algebra. Moreover, we explain how to exploit discrete symmetries and how to avoid unphysical poles in amplitudes in practice. The efficiency of the formalism is demonstrated by giving explicit compact results for the helicity amplitudes of the processes gamma gamma -> f fbar, f fbar -> gamma gamma gamma, mu^- mu^+ -> f fbar gamma.
We examine multiphoton production in the electroweak sector of the Standard Model in the high energy limit using the equivalence theorem in combination with spinor helicity techniques. We obtain recursion relations for currents consisting of a charged scalar, spinor, or vector line that radiates $n$ photons. Closed form solutions to these recursion relations for arbitrary $n$ are presented for the cases of like-helicity and one unlike-helicity photon production. We apply the currents singly and in pairs to obtain amplitudes for processes involving the production of $n$ photons with up to two u…
We present an alternative approach for calculating helicity amplitudes for processes involving both massless and massive fermions. With this method one can easily obtain covariant expressions for the helicity amplitudes. The final expressions involve only four vector products and are independent of the basis for gamma matrices or specific form of the spinors. We use the method to obtain the helicity amplitudes for several processes involving top quark production.
We present the one-loop helicity amplitudes with five external gluons. The computation employs string-based methods, new techniques for performing tensor integrals, and improvements in the spinor helicity method.
We illustrate the use of recursion relations in the computation of certain one-loop helicity amplitudes containing an arbitrary number of gauge bosons. After a brief review of the recursion relations themselves, we discuss the resolution of the apparent conflict between the spinor helicity method used to solve the recursion relations and the dimensional regulator used in the loop integrals. We then outline the procedure for constructing loop amplitudes, and present two examples of results obtained in this manner.
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.
In this paper, we show how to calculate analytically the one-loop helicity amplitudes for the process $q\bar{q} rightarrow t\bar{t}$ induced by KK gluon, using the spinor-helicity formalism. A minimal set of Feynman rules which are uniquely fixed by gauge invariance and the color representation of the KK gluon are derived and used in the calculation. Our results can be applied to a variety of models containing a massive color octet vector boson.
We introduce the Majorana spinors in the momentum representation. They obey the Dirac-like equation with eight components, which has been first introduced by Markov. Thus, the Fock space for corresponding quantum fields is doubled (as shown by Ziino). The particular attention has been paid to the questions of chirality and helicity (two concepts which frequently are confused in the literature) for Dirac and Majorana states.
A method is developed whereby spinor helicity techniques can be used to simplify the calculation of loop amplitudes. This is achieved by using the Feynman-parameter representation where the offending off-shell loop momenta do not appear. Background Feynman gauge also helps to simplify the calculations. This method is applicable to any Feynman diagram with any number of loops as long as the external masses can be ignored, and it is at least as efficient as the string technique in the special circumstances when the latter can be used. In order to minimize the very considerable algebra encountere…
We compute the next-to-maximally-helicity-violating one-loop n-gluon amplitudes in N=1 super-Yang-Mills theory. These amplitudes contain three negative-helicity gluons and an arbitrary number of positive-helicity gluons, and constitute the first infinite series of amplitudes beyond the simplest, MHV, amplitudes. We assemble ingredients from the N=4 NMHV tree super-amplitude into previously unwritten double cuts and use the spinor integration technique to calculate all bubble coefficients. We also derive the missing box coefficients from quadruple cuts. Together with the known formula for three…
In a few recent papers we introduced the chirality-flow formalism, which was shown to make calculations of tree-level Feynman diagrams simple and transparent. Chirality flow, which is based on the spinor-helicity formalism, allows to often immediately analytically write down a tree-level Feynman diagram in terms of spinor inner products. In this paper, we argue that there is also a significant simplification of the Lorentz structure at the one-loop level, at least when using the four-dimensional formulation of the four-dimensional helicity scheme. Additionally, we find that the possible terms …
