Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-2014

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Physics

Major Professor

George Siopsis

Committee Members

Christine Nattrass, Mike Guidry, Fernando Schwartz, Yuri Efremenko

Abstract

We calculate gauge theory one-loop amplitudes with the aid of the complex shift used in the Britto- Cachazo-Feng-Witten (BCFW) recursion relations of tree amplitudes. We apply the shift to the integrand and show that the contribution from the limit of infinite shift vanishes after integrating over the loop momentum, with a judicious choice of basis for polarization vectors. This enables us to write the one-loop amplitude in terms of on-shell tree and lower-point one-loop amplitudes. Some of the tree amplitudes are forward amplitudes. We show that their potential singularities do not contribute and the BCFW recursion relations can be applied in such a way as to avoid these singularities altogether. We calculate in detail n-point one-loop amplitudes for n = 2, 3, 4, and outline the generalization of our method to n > 4. In addition to scattering amplitudes in flat space, we studied amplitudes in Antide Sitter (AdS) space, which is equivalent to conformal correlators in the boundary of the Anti-de Sitter space. We discuss the use of the embedding formalism and Mellin transform in the calculation of tree-level correlators of scalar and vector fields in AdS/CFT. We present an iterative procedure that builds amplitudes by sewing together lower-point off-shell diagrams. Both scalar and vector correlators are shown to be given in terms of Mellin amplitudes. We apply the procedure to the explicit calculation of three-, four- and five-point correlators.

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