Scattering of Glue by Glue on the Light-cone Worldsheet II: Helicity Conserving Amplitudes

TL;DR

This paper calculates one-loop helicity conserving gluon scattering amplitudes in light-cone gauge, addressing infrared divergences and their cancellation with bremsstrahlung contributions, and discusses implications for light-cone worldsheet string models.

Contribution

It provides a novel light-cone gauge calculation of gluon scattering amplitudes with explicit infrared divergence treatment and introduces a new ultraviolet regulator compatible with the light-cone worldsheet framework.

Findings

Infrared divergences cancel between elastic and bremsstrahlung processes.

Explicit counterterms are needed for covariant ultraviolet regularization.

The approach suggests a six-dimensional string interpretation of QCD.

Abstract

This is the second of a pair of articles on scattering of glue by glue, in which we give the light-cone gauge calculation of the one-loop on-shell helicity conserving scattering amplitudes for gluon-gluon scattering (neglecting quark loops). The 1/p^+ factors in the gluon propagator are regulated by replacing p^+ integrals with discretized sums omitting the p^+=0 terms in each sum. We also employ a novel ultraviolet regulator that is convenient for the light-cone worldsheet description of planar Feynman diagrams. The helicity conserving scattering amplitudes are divergent in the infra-red. The infrared divergences in the elastic one-loop amplitude are shown to cancel, in their contribution to cross sections, against ones in the cross section for unseen bremsstrahlung gluons. We include here the explicit calculation of the latter, because it assumes an unfamiliar form due to the peculiar way discretization of p^+ regulates infrared divergences. In resolving the infrared divergences we employ a covariant definition of jets, which allows a transparent demonstration of the Lorentz invariance of our final results. Because we use an explicit cutoff of the ultraviolet divergences in exactly 4 space-time dimensions, we must introduce explicit counterterms to achieve this final covariant result. These counter-terms are polynomials in the external momenta of the precise order dictated by power-counting. We discuss the modifications they entail for the light-cone worldsheet action that reproduces the ``bare'' planar diagrams of the gluonic sector of QCD. The simplest way to do this is to interpret the QCD string as moving in six space-time dimensions.