Search for: All records

A bstract We describe the implementation of infrared subtractions for two-loop QCD corrections to quark-antiquark annihilation to electroweak final states. The subtractions are given as form-factor integrands whose integrals are known. The resulting subtracted amplitudes are amenable to efficient numerical integration. Our procedure is based on the universality of infrared singularities and requires a relatively limited set of subtractions, whose number grows as the number of two-loop diagrams, rather than with the number of singular regions of integration. 

A bstract We study the singularity structure of two-loop QED amplitudes for the production of multiple off-shell photons in massless electron-positron annihilation and develop counterterms that remove their infrared and ultraviolet divergences point by point in the loop integrand. The remainders of the subtraction are integrable in four dimensions and can be computed in the future with numerical integration. The counterterms capture the divergences of the amplitudes and factorize in terms of the Born amplitude and the finite remainder of the one-loop amplitude. They consist of simple one- and two-loop integrals with at most three external momenta and can be integrated analytically in a simple manner with established methods. We uncover novel aspects of fully local IR factorization, where vertex and self energy subdiagrams must be modified by new symmetrizations over loop momenta, in order to expose their tree-like tensor structures and hence factorization of IR singularities prior to loop integration. This work is a first step towards isolating locally the hard contributions of generic gauge theory amplitudes and rendering them integrable in exactly four dimensions with numerical methods.