No Arabic abstract
Loop amplitudes for massless five particle scattering processes contain Feynman integrals depending on the external momentum invariants: pentagon functions. We perform a detailed study of the analyticity properties and cut structure of these functions up to two loops in the planar case, where we classify and identify the minimal set of basis functions. They are computed from the canonical form of their differential equations and expressed in terms of generalized polylogarithms, or alternatively as one-dimensional integrals. We present analytical expressions and numerical evaluation routines for these pentagon functions, in all kinematical configurations relevant to five-particle scattering processes.
We complete the analytic calculation of the full set of two-loop Feynman integrals required for computation of massless five-particle scattering amplitudes. We employ the method of canonical differential equations to construct a minimal basis set of transcendental functions, pentagon functions, which is sufficient to express all planar and nonplanar massless five-point two-loop Feynman integrals in the whole physical phase space. We find analytic expressions for pentagon functions which are manifestly free of unphysical branch cuts. We present a public library for numerical evaluation of pentagon functions suitable for immediate phenomenological applications.
These notes are a written version of my talk given at the CARMA workshop in June 2017, with some additional material. I presented a few concepts that have recently been used in the computation of tree-level scattering amplitudes (mostly using pure spinor methods but not restricted to it) in a context that could be of interest to the combinatorics community. In particular, I focused on the appearance of {it planar binary trees} in scattering amplitudes and presented some curious identities obeyed by related objects, some of which are known to be true only via explicit examples.
We present the analytic form of all leading-color two-loop five-parton helicity amplitudes in QCD. The results are analytically reconstructed from exact numerical evaluations over finite fields. Combining a judicious choice of variables with a new approach to the treatment of particle states in $D$ dimensions for the numerical evaluation of amplitudes, we obtain the analytic expressions with a modest computational effort. Their systematic simplification using multivariate partial-fraction decomposition leads to a particularly compact form. Our results provide all two-loop amplitudes required for the calculation of next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the production of three jets at hadron colliders in the leading-color approximation.
We present the analytic form of the two-loop five-gluon scattering amplitudes in QCD for a complete set of independent helicity configurations of external gluons. These include the first analytic results for five-point two-loop amplitudes relevant for the computation of next-to-next-to-leading-order QCD corrections at hadron colliders. The results were obtained by reconstructing analytic expressions from numerical evaluations. The complexity of the computation is reduced by exploiting physical and analytical properties of the amplitudes, employing a minimal basis of so-called pentagon functions that have recently been classified.
In PRL 116 (2016) no.6, 062001, the space of planar pentagon functions that describes all two-loop on-shell five-particle scattering amplitudes was introduced. In the present paper we present a natural extension of this space to non-planar pentagon functions. This provides the basis for our pentagon bootstrap program. We classify the relevant functions up to weight four, which is relevant for two-loop scattering amplitudes. We constrain the first entry of the symbol of the functions using information on branch cuts. Drawing on an analogy from the planar case, we introduce a conjectural second-entry condition on the symbol. We then show that the information on the function space, when complemented with some additional insights, can be used to efficiently bootstrap individual Feynman integrals. The extra information is read off of Mellin-Barnes representations of the integrals, either by evaluating simple asymptotic limits, or by taking discontinuities in the kinematic variables. We use this method to evaluate the symbols of two non-trivial non-planar five-particle integrals, up to and including the finite part.