Anomalous Ward identities for on-shell amplitudes at the conformal fixed point

Abstract Conformal symmetry underlies many massless quantum field theories, but little is known about the consequences of this powerful symmetry for on-shell scattering amplitudes. Working in a dimensionally-regularised ϕ 3 model at the conformal fixed point, we show that the on-shell renormalised a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dmitry Chicherin, Johannes Henn, Simone Zoia
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2023-06-01
Series:Journal of High Energy Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2023)110
Description
Summary:Abstract Conformal symmetry underlies many massless quantum field theories, but little is known about the consequences of this powerful symmetry for on-shell scattering amplitudes. Working in a dimensionally-regularised ϕ 3 model at the conformal fixed point, we show that the on-shell renormalised amplitudes satisfy anomalous conformal Ward identities. Each external on-shell state contributes two terms to the anomaly. The first term is proportional to the elementary field anomalous dimension, and thus involves only lower-loop information. We show that the second term can be given as the convolution of a universal collinear function and lower-order amplitudes. The computation of the conformal anomaly is therefore simpler than that of the amplitude at the same perturbative order, which gives our anomalous conformal Ward identities a strong predictive power in perturbation theory. Finally, we show that our result is also of practical importance for dimensionally-regularised amplitudes away from the conformal fixed point.
ISSN:1029-8479