Gluon helicity flip in a plane wave background

Abstract

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 gauge group SU(2), and evaluate both the high- and low-energy limits. Throughout, we compare and contrast with the calculation of photon helicity flip in strong-field QED.

33 pages, 4 pdf figures

References in corpus (30)

• Extremely high-intensity laser interactions with fundamental quantum systems
• Quantum Chromodynamics and Other Field Theories on the Light Cone
• Perturbative Gauge Theory As A String Theory In Twistor Space
• The Color Glass Condensate
• The Low-Energy Frontier of Particle Physics
• Perturbative Quantum Gravity as a Double Copy of Gauge Theory
• Scattering Amplitudes and the Conservative Hamiltonian for Binary Systems at Third Post-Minkowskian Order
• From Scattering Amplitudes to Classical Potentials in the Post-Minkowskian Expansion
• On the Observation of Vacuum Birefringence
• The Color Glass Condensate and High Energy Scattering in QCD
• Inelastic Black Hole Scattering from Charged Scalar Amplitudes
• Finite size effects in stimulated laser pair production
• The Ultraviolet Properties of N=4 Supergravity at Four Loops
• Light shining through walls
• The Kerr-Schild double copy in curved spacetime
• Gravitational Radiation from Color-Kinematics Duality
• Scattering on plane waves and the double copy
• Superluminality and UV Completion
• The intensity dependent mass shift: existence, universality and detection
• High Gluon Densities in Heavy Ions Collisions
• Carroll symmetry of plane gravitational waves
• Light-Front-Quantized QCD in Light-Cone Gauge: The Doubly Transverse Gauge Propagator
• Exact final state integrals for strong field QED
• Plane wave backgrounds and colour-kinematics duality
• Axion-like-particle search with high-intensity lasers
• Photo-production of scalar particles in the field of a circularly polarized laser beam
• Equivalence of renormalized covariant and light-front perturbation theory: I. Longitudinal divergences in the Yukawa model
• ALP production through non-linear Compton scattering in intense fields
• Electron-seeded ALP production and ALP decay in an oscillating electromagnetic field
• Nonlinear neutrino-photon interactions inside strong laser pulses

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Advances in QED with intense background fields
• Double Copy for Celestial Amplitudes
• Classical and quantum double copy of back-reaction
• MHV scattering of gluons and gravitons in chiral strong fields
• Gluon scattering on self-dual radiative gauge fields
• Exact results for scattering on ultra-short plane wave backgrounds
• The classical double copy in curved spacetimes: Perturbative Yang-Mills from the bi-adjoint scalar
• The analytic structure of amplitudes on backgrounds from gauge invariance and the infra-red
• One-loop multicollinear limits from 2-point amplitudes on self-dual backgrounds
• Waveforms from Amplitudes
• Quasiclassical representation of the Volkov propagator and the tadpole diagram in a plane wave
• Dynamics, quantum states and Compton scattering in nonlinear gravitational waves
• Exact Green's function for fermions in an external Yang-Mills gauge field