A Stroll through the Loop-Tree Duality

The Loop-Tree Duality (LTD) theorem is an innovative technique to deal with multi-loop scattering amplitudes, leading to integrand-level representations over a Euclidean space. In this article, we review the last developments concerning this framework, focusing on the manifestly causal representation of multi-loop Feynman integrals and scattering amplitudes, and the definition of dual local counter-terms to cancel infrared singularities.

A prescription for projectors to compute helicity amplitudes in D dimensions

This article discusses a prescription to compute polarized dimensionally regularized amplitudes, providing a recipe for constructing simple and general polarized amplitude projectors in D dimensions that avoids conventional Lorentz tensor decomposition and avoids also dimensional splitting. Because of the latter, commutation between Lorentz index contraction and loop integration is preserved within this prescription, which entails certain technical advantages. The usage of these D-dimensional polarized amplitude projectors results in helicity amplitudes that can be expressed solely in terms of external momenta, but different from those defined in the existing dimensional regularization schemes. Furthermore, we argue that despite being different from the conventional dimensional regularization scheme (CDR), owing to the amplitude-level factorization of ultraviolet and infrared singularities, our prescription can be used, within an infrared subtraction framework, in a hybrid way without re-calculating the (process-independent) integrated subtraction coefficients, many of which are available in CDR. This hybrid CDR-compatible prescription is shown to be unitary. We include two examples to demonstrate this explicitly and also to illustrate its usage in practice.

Local Unitarity: a representation of differential cross-sections that is locally free of infrared singularities at any order

We propose a novel representation of differential scattering cross-sections that locally realises the direct cancellation of infrared singularities exhibited by its so-called real-emission and virtual degrees of freedom. We take advantage of the Loop-Tree Duality representation of each individual forward-scattering diagram and we prove that the ensuing expression is locally free of infrared divergences, applies at any perturbative order and for any process without initial-state collinear singularities. Divergences for loop momenta with large magnitudes are regulated using local ultraviolet counterterms that reproduce the usual Lagrangian renormalisation procedure of quantum field theories. Our representation is especially suited for a numerical implementation and we demonstrate its practical potential by computing fully numerically and without any IR counterterm the next-to-leading order accurate differential cross-section for the process e+e− → $$ d\overline{d} $$ d d ¯ . We also show first results beyond next-to-leading order by computing interference terms part of the N4LO-accurate inclusive cross-section of a 1 → 2 + X scalar scattering process.

Bottom-quark production at hadron colliders: fully differential predictions in NNLO QCD

We report on the first fully differential calculation of the next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) QCD radiative corrections to the production of bottom-quark pairs at hadron colliders. The calculation is performed by using the qT subtraction formalism to handle and cancel infrared singularities in real and virtual contributions. The computation is implemented in the Matrix framework, thereby allowing us to efficiently compute arbitrary infrared-safe observables in the four-flavour scheme. We present selected predictions for bottom-quark production at the Tevatron and at the LHC at different collider energies, and we perform some comparisons with available experimental results. We find that the NNLO corrections are sizeable, typically of the order of 25–35%, and they lead to a significant reduction of the perturbative uncertainties. Therefore, their inclusion is crucial for an accurate theoretical description of this process.