No Arabic abstract
We study two-to-two parton scattering amplitudes in the high-energy limit of perturbative QCD by iteratively solving the BFKL equation. This allows us to predict the imaginary part of the amplitude to leading-logarithmic order for arbitrary $t$-channel colour exchange. The corrections we compute correspond to ladder diagrams with any number of rungs formed between two Reggeized gluons. Our approach exploits a separation of the two-Reggeon wavefunction, performed directly in momentum space, between a soft region and a generic (hard) region. The former component of the wavefunction leads to infrared divergences in the amplitude and is therefore computed in dimensional regularization; the latter is computed directly in two transverse dimensions and is expressed in terms of single-valued harmonic polylogarithms of uniform weight. By combining the two we determine exactly both infrared-divergent and finite contributions to the two-to-two scattering amplitude order-by-order in perturbation theory. We study the result numerically to 13 loops and find that finite corrections to the amplitude have a finite radius of convergence which depends on the colour representation of the $t$-channel exchange.
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 compute a complete set of independent leading-color two-loop five-parton amplitudes in QCD. These constitute a fundamental ingredient for the next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to three-jet production at hadron colliders. We show how to consistently consider helicity amplitudes with external fermions in dimensional regularization, allowing the application of a numerical variant of the unitarity approach. Amplitudes are computed by exploiting a decomposition of the integrand into master and surface terms that is independent of the parton type. Master integral coefficients are numerically computed in either finite-field or floating-point arithmetic and combined with known analytic master integrals. We recompute two-loop leading-color four-parton amplitudes as a check of our implementation. Results are presented for all independent four- and five-parton processes including contributions with massless closed fermion loops.
We analyse the high-energy limit of the gluon-gluon scattering amplitude in QCD, and display an intriguing relation between the finite parts of the one-loop gluon impact factor and the finite parts of the two-loop Regge trajectory.
We present the analytic form of the two-loop four-graviton scattering amplitudes in Einstein gravity. To remove ultraviolet divergences we include counterterms quadratic and cubic in the Riemann curvature tensor. The two-loop numerical unitarity approach is used to deal with the challenging momentum dependence of the interactions. We exploit the algebraic properties of the integrand of the amplitude in order to map it to a minimal basis of Feynman integrals. Analytic expressions are obtained from numerical evaluations of the amplitude. Finally, we show that four-graviton scattering observables depend on fewer couplings than naively expected.
A summary is presented of the most recent matrix elements for massless 2 to 2 scattering processes calculated at two loops in QCD perturbation theory together with a brief review on the calculational methods and techniques used.