Scattering of Massless Particles: Scalars, Gluons and Gravitons

TL;DR

This paper extends a compact formula for tree-level scattering amplitudes to include massless colored scalar theories, revealing a natural color-kinematics correspondence and connections to known dualities and mathematical structures.

Contribution

It introduces a new formulation for scalar theories analogous to Yang-Mills and gravity, demonstrating a unified approach and revealing links to BCJ duality and the KLT matrix.

Findings

Derived a compact integral formula for scalar theory amplitudes.

Established a color-kinematics correspondence for scalar theories.

Connected the scalar amplitude expansion to Catalan numbers and Chebyshev polynomials.

Abstract

In a recent note we presented a compact formula for the complete tree-level S-matrix of pure Yang-Mills and gravity theories in arbitrary spacetime dimension. In this paper we show that a natural formulation also exists for a massless colored cubic scalar theory. In Yang-Mills, the formula is an integral over the space of n marked points on a sphere and has as integrand two factors. The first factor is a combination of Parke-Taylor-like terms dressed with U(N) color structures while the second is a Pfaffian. The S-matrix of a U(N)xU(N') cubic scalar theory is obtained by simply replacing the Pfaffian with a U(N') version of the previous U(N) factor. Given that gravity amplitudes are obtained by replacing the U(N) factor in Yang-Mills by a second Pfaffian, we are led to a natural color-kinematics correspondence. An expansion of the integrand of the scalar theory leads to sums over trivalent graphs and are directly related to the KLT matrix. We find a connection to the BCJ color-kinematics duality as well as a new proof of the BCJ doubling property that gives rise to gravity amplitudes. We end by considering a special kinematic point where the partial amplitude simply counts the number of color-ordered planar trivalent trees, which equals a Catalan number. The scattering equations simplify dramatically and are equivalent to a special Y-system with solutions related to roots of Chebyshev polynomials.