The QED four-photon amplitudes off-shell: Part 2

Abstract

This is the second one of a series of four papers devoted to a first calculation of the scalar and spinor QED four-photon amplitudes completely off-shell. We use the worldline formalism which provides a gauge-invariant decomposition for these amplitudes as well as compact integral representations. It also makes it straightforward to integrate out any given photon leg in the low-energy limit, and in the present sequel we do this with two of the four photons. For the special case where the two unrestricted photon momenta are equal and opposite the information on these amplitudes is also contained in the constant-field vacuum polarisation tensors, which provides a check on our results. Although these amplitudes are finite, for possible use as higher-loop building blocks we evaluate all integrals in dimensional regularisation. As an example, we use them to construct the two-loop vacuum polarisation tensors in the low-energy approximation, rederive from those the two-loop β-function coefficients and analyse their anatomy with respect to the gauge-invariant decomposition. As an application to an external-field problem, we provide a streamlined calculation of the Delbrück scattering amplitudes in the low-energy limit. All calculations are done in parallel for scalar and spinor QED.