Surface Kinematics and "The" Yang-Mills Integrand

Abstract

It has been a long-standing challenge to define a canonical loop integrand for non-supersymmetric gluon scattering amplitudes in the planar limit. Naive integrands are inflicted with $1/0$ ambiguities associated with tadpoles and massless external bubbles, which destroy integrand-level gauge invariance as well as consistent on-shell factorization on single loop-cuts. In this letter, we show that this essentially kinematical obstruction to defining "the" integrand for Yang-Mills theory has a structural solution, handed to us by the formulation of gluon amplitudes in terms of curves on surfaces. This defines "surface kinematics" generalizing momenta, making it possible to define "the" integrand satisfying both a (surface generalized) notion of gauge-invariance and consistent loop-cuts. The integrand also vanishes at infinity in appropriate directions, allowing it to be recursively computed for non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in any number of dimensions. We illustrate these ideas through one loop for all multiplicity, and for the simplest two-loop integrand.

13 pages, 4 figures; references added, published version

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• The Amplituhedron
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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Cosmohedra
• Emergence of Unitarity and Locality from Hidden Zeros at One-Loop Order
• Form factors from string amplitudes
• Surface Gauge Invariance, Soft Limits and the Transmutation of Gluons into Scalars
• Correlator Polytopes
• Systematic approach to $\ell$-loop planar integrands from the classical equation of motion
• The bi-adjoint scalar $\ell$-loop planar integrand recursion and graded inverse variables