Gluon Wavefunctions and Amplitudes on the Light-Front

TL;DR

This paper derives exact multi-gluon wavefunctions and scattering amplitudes on the light-front, connecting them to known Parke-Taylor results and providing recurrence relations in light-cone gauge.

Contribution

It introduces new recurrence relations for gluon wavefunctions and links multi-gluon scattering amplitudes to wavefunctions in light-front perturbation theory.

Findings

Exact multi-gluon wavefunctions derived

Scattering amplitudes related to wavefunctions

Results match Parke-Taylor amplitudes for certain helicities

Abstract

We investigate the tree level multi-gluon components of the gluon light cone wavefunctions in the light cone gauge keeping the exact kinematics of the gluon emissions. We focus on the components with all helicities identical to the helicity of the incoming gluon. The recurrence relations for the gluon wavefunctions are derived. In the case when the virtuality of the incoming gluon is neglected the exact form of the multi-gluon wavefunction as well as the fragmentation function is obtained. Furthermore we analyze the 2 to N tree-level gluon scattering in the framework of light-front perturbation theory and we demonstrate that the amplitude for this process can be obtained from the 1 to N+1 gluon wavefunction. Finally, we demonstrate that our results for selected helicity configurations are equivalent to the Parke-Taylor amplitudes.