Exploring transcendentality in superstring amplitudes


Abstract in English

It is well known that the low energy expansion of tree-level superstring scattering amplitudes satisfies a suitably defined version of maximum transcendentality. In this paper it is argued that there is a natural extension of this definition that applies to the genus-one four-graviton Type II superstring amplitude to all orders in the low-energy expansion. To obtain this result, the integral over the genus-one moduli space is partitioned into a region ${cal M}_R$ surrounding the cusp and its complement ${cal M}_L$, and an exact expression is obtained for the contribution to the amplitude from ${cal M}_R$. The low-energy expansion of the ${cal M}_R$ contribution is proven to be free of irreducible multiple zeta-values to all orders. The contribution to the amplitude from ${cal M}_L$ is computed in terms of modular graph functions up to order $D^{12} {cal R}^4$ in the low-energy expansion, and general arguments are used beyond this order to conjecture the transcendentality properties of the ${cal M}_L$ contributions. Maximal transcendentality of the full amplitude holds provided we assign a non-zero weight to certain harmonic sums, an assumption which is familiar from transcendentality assignments in quantum field theory amplitudes.

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