Journal of High Energy Physics (May 2019)

A graphic approach to gauge invariance induced identity

  • Linghui Hou,
  • Yi-Jian Du

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2019)012
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2019, no. 5
pp. 1 – 64

Abstract

Read online

Abstract All tree-level amplitudes in Einstein-Yang-Mills (EYM) theory and gravity (GR) can be expanded in terms of color ordered Yang-Mills (YM) ones whose coefficients are polynomial functions of Lorentz inner products and are constructed by a graphic rule. Once the gauge invariance condition of any graviton is imposed, the expansion of a tree level EYM or gravity amplitude induces a nontrivial identity between color ordered YM amplitudes. Being different from traditional Kleiss-Kuijf (KK) and Bern-Carrasco-Johansson (BCJ) relations, the gauge invariance induced identity involves polarizations in the coefficients. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the gauge invariance induced identity and traditional BCJ relations. By proposing a refined graphic rule, we prove that all the gauge invariance induced identities for single trace tree-level EYM amplitudes can be precisely expanded in terms of traditional BCJ relations, without referring any property of polarizations. When further considering the transversality of polarizations and momentum conservation, we prove that the gauge invariance induced identity for tree-level GR (or pure YM) amplitudes can also be expanded in terms of traditional BCJ relations for YM (or bi-scalar) amplitudes. As a byproduct, a graph-based BCJ relation is proposed and proved.

Keywords