Friday, February 17, 2012

1112.6432 (Jacob L. Bourjaily et al.)

The Soft-Collinear Bootstrap: N=4 Yang-Mills Amplitudes at Six and Seven
Loops
   [PDF]

Jacob L. Bourjaily, Alexander DiRe, Amin Shaikh, Marcus Spradlin, Anastasia Volovich
Infrared divergences in scattering amplitudes arise when a loop momentum
$\ell$ becomes collinear with a massless external momentum $p$. In gauge
theories, it is known that the L-loop logarithm of a planar amplitude has much
softer infrared singularities than the L-loop amplitude itself. We argue that
planar amplitudes in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory enjoy softer than expected
behavior as $\ell \parallel p$ already at the level of the integrand. Moreover,
we conjecture that the four-point integrand can be uniquely determined, to any
loop-order, by imposing the correct soft-behavior of the logarithm together
with dual conformal invariance and dihedral symmetry. We use these simple
criteria to determine explicit formulae for the four-point integrand through
seven-loops, finding perfect agreement with previously known results through
five-loops. As an input to this calculation we enumerate all four-point dual
conformally invariant (DCI) integrands through seven-loops, an analysis which
is aided by several graph-theoretic theorems we prove about general DCI
integrands at arbitrary loop-order. The six- and seven-loop amplitudes receive
non-zero contributions from 229 and 1873 individual DCI diagrams respectively.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.6432

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