No Arabic abstract
One approach to the calculation of cross sections for infrared-safe observables in high energy collisions at next-to-leading order is to perform all of the integrations, including the virtual loop integration, by Monte Carlo numerical integration. In a previous paper, two of us have shown how one can perform such a virtual loop integration numerically after first introducing a Feynman parameter representation. In this paper, we perform the integration directly, without introducing Feynman parameters, after suitably deforming the integration contour. Our example is the N-photon scattering amplitude with a massless electron loop. We report results for N = 6 and N = 8.
A framework to represent and compute two-loop $N$-point Feynman diagrams as double-integrals is discussed. The integrands are generalised one-loop type multi-point functions multiplied by simple weighting factors. The final integrations over these two variables are to be performed numerically, whereas the ingredients involved in the integrands, in particular the generalised one-loop type functions, are computed analytically. The idea is illustrated on a few examples of scalar three- and four-point functions.
Recent progress in unitarity techniques for one-loop scattering amplitudes makes a numerical implementation of this method possible. We present a 4-dimensional unitarity method for calculating the cut-constructible part of amplitudes and implement the method in a numerical procedure. Our technique can be applied to any one-loop scattering amplitude and offers the possibility that one-loop calculations can be performed in an automatic fashion, as tree-level amplitudes are currently done. Instead of individual Feynman diagrams, the ingredients for our one-loop evaluation are tree-level amplitudes, which are often already known. To study the practicality of this method we evaluate the cut-constructible part of the 4, 5 and 6 gluon one-loop amplitudes numerically, using the analytically known 4, 5 and 6 gluon tree-level amplitudes. Comparisons with analytic answers are performed to ascertain the numerical accuracy of the method.
We suggest a new approach for the automatic and fully numerical evaluation of one-loop scattering amplitudes in perturbative quantum field theory. We use suitably formulated dispersion relations to perform the calculation as a convolution of tree-level amplitudes. This allows to take advantage of the iterative numerical algorithms for the evaluation of leading order matrix elements.
We review recent progress that we have achieved in evaluating the class of fully massive vacuum integrals at five loops. After discussing topics that arise in classification, evaluation and algorithmic codification of this specific set of Feynman integrals, we present some selected new results for their expansions around $4-2varepsilon$ dimensions.
We present a diagrammatic formulation of recently-revived covariant functional approaches to one-loop matching from an ultraviolet (UV) theory to a low-energy effective field theory. Various terms following from a covariant derivative expansion (CDE) are represented by diagrams which, unlike conventional Feynman diagrams, involve gauge-covariant quantities and are thus dubbed covariant diagrams. The use of covariant diagrams helps organize and simplify one-loop matching calculations, which we illustrate with examples. Of particular interest is the derivation of UV model-independent universal results, which reduce matching calculations of specific UV models to applications of master formulas. We show how such derivation can be done in a more concise manner than the previous literature, and discuss how additional structures that are not directly captured by existing universal results, including mixed heavy-light loops, open covariant derivatives, and mixed statistics, can be easily accounted for.