Nuclear Physics B (Feb 2022)

Manifest colour-kinematics duality and double-copy in the string-based formalism

  • Naser Ahmadiniaz,
  • Filippo Maria Balli,
  • Olindo Corradini,
  • Cristhiam Lopez-Arcos,
  • Alexander Quintero Vélez,
  • Christian Schubert

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 975
p. 115690

Abstract

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The relation for the gravity polarisation tensor as the tensor product of two gluon polarisation vectors has been well-known for a long time, but a version of this relation for multi-particle fields is presently still not known. Here we show that in order for this to happen we first have to ensure that the multi-particle polarisations satisfy colour-kinematics duality. In previous work it has been show that this arises naturally from the Bern-Kosower formalism for one-loop gluon amplitudes, and here we show that the tensor product for multi-particle fields arises naturally in the Bern-Dunbar-Shimada formalism for one-loop gravity amplitudes. This allows us to formulate a new prescription for double-copy gravity Berends-Giele currents, and to obtain both the colour-dressed Yang-Mills Berends-Giele currents in the Bern-Carrasco-Johansson gauge and the gravitational Berends-Giele currents explicitly. An attractive feature of our formalism is that it never becomes necessary to determine gauge transformation terms. Our double-copy prescription can also be applied to other cases, and to make this point we derive the double-copy perturbiners for α′-deformed gravity and the bi-adjoint scalar model.