Three-loop helicity amplitudes for four-quark scattering in massless QCD

Abstract

We compute the three-loop corrections to the helicity amplitudes for $q\bar{q}\to Q\bar{Q}$ scattering in massless QCD. In the Lorentz decomposition of the scattering amplitude we avoid evanescent Lorentz structures and map the corresponding form factors directly to the physical helicity amplitudes. We reduce the amplitudes to master integrals and express them in terms of harmonic polylogarithms. The renormalised amplitudes exhibit infrared divergences of dipole and quadrupole type, as predicted by previous work on the infrared structure of multileg scattering amplitudes. We derive the finite remainders and present explicit results for all relevant partonic channels, both for equal and different quark flavours.

33 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables; electronic files with analytical results. v2: added references, fixed typos, fixed analytic continuation. v3: fixed error in ancillary files