Helicity amplitudes in light-cone and Feynman-diagram gauges

TL;DR

This paper develops and implements a general light-cone gauge propagator for all Standard Model gauge bosons in HELAS codes, enabling consistent evaluation of helicity amplitudes and analyzing interference patterns in high-energy scattering processes.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive light-cone gauge propagator for SM gauge bosons, integrated into HELAS and MadGraph, improving the calculation of helicity amplitudes and understanding of gauge dependence.

Findings

Numerical codes produce gauge-invariant helicity amplitudes.

Generic LC gauge cannot remove all energy-growing off-shell components.

FD gauge vector choice systematically removes energy-growing terms.

Abstract

Recently proposed Feynman-diagram (FD) gauge propagator for massless and massive gauge bosons is obtained from a light-cone (LC) gauge propagator, by choosing the gauge vector along the opposite direction of the gauge boson three-momentum. We implement a general LC gauge propagator for all the gauge bosons of the Standard Model (SM) in the HELicity Amplitude Subroutines (HELAS) codes, such that all the SM helicity amplitudes can be evaluated at the tree level in the LC gauge by using MadGraph. We confirm that our numerical codes produce physical helicity amplitudes which are consistent among all gauge choices. We then study interference patterns among Feynman amplitudes, for a few $2\to3$ scattering processes in QED and QCD, and the process $\gamma\gamma\to W^+W^-$ followed by the $W^\pm$ decays. We find that in a generic LC gauge, where all the gauge boson propagators share a common gauge vector, we cannot remove the off-shell current components which grow with their energy systematically from all the Feynman amplitudes in $2\to3$ processes. On the other hand, the $5\times5$ LC gauge propagator for the weak bosons removes components which grow with energy due to the longitudinal polarization mode of the external bi-fermion currents, and hence can give $2\to2$ weak boson scattering amplitudes which are free from subtle cancellation at high energies. The particular choice of the FD gauge vector has advantages over generic LC gauge, not only because all the terms which grow with energy of off-shell and on-shell currents are removed systematically from all the diagrams, but also because no artificial gauge vector direction dependence of individual amplitudes appears.