Ambitwistor strings and the scattering equations

By L. Mason, David Skinner. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2013

391 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that string theories admit chiral infinite tension analogues in which only the massless parts of the spectrum survive. Geometrically they describe holomorphic maps to spaces of complex null geodesics, known as ambitwistor spaces. They have the standard critical space-time dimensions of string theory (26 in the bosonic case and 10 for the superstring). Quantization leads to the formulae for tree-level scattering amplitudes of massless particles found recently by Cachazo, He and Yuan. These representations localize the vertex operators to solutions of the same equations found by Gross and Mende to govern the behaviour of strings in the limit of high energy, fixed angle scattering. Here, localization to the scattering equations emerges naturally as a consequence of working on ambitwistor space. The worldsheet theory suggests a way to extend these amplitudes to spinor fields and to loop level. We argue that this family of string theories is a natural extension of the existing twistor string theories.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec77a5e98f72e3a0ec6c250cd995f96774a62330

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Humberto Gomez
2. Song He
3. Tim Adamo
4. L. Mason
5. Chris D. White
6. F. Cachazo
7. R. Monteiro
8. E. Y. Yuan

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. L. Mason
2. Song He
3. F. Cachazo
4. Humberto Gomez
5. N. Arkani-Hamed
6. C. Cheung
7. Tim Adamo
8. A. Luna

In Political Science and International Relations

1. N. Berkovits
2. Song He
3. Tim Adamo
4. F. Cachazo
5. E. Y. Yuan
6. Eduardo Casali
7. L. Mason
8. Chris D. White

Citations in the corpus

• Celestial amplitudes and conformal soft theorems (2019, methodology): “tors with dimensions {∆i} on Sd. 2.2 Ambitwistorstrings and theconformal basis Ambitwistor strings are worldsheet models that directly produce the CHY formulae (2.1) as their worldsheet path-integral [27, 30, 31]. Unlike ordinary string theories, they are chiral and constrained, containing only mass”
• Einstein-Yang-Mills scattering amplitudes from scattering equations (2014, methodology): “The striking similarity of all these constructions to string theory ones led Mason and Skinner to the construction of a series of ambitwistor string theories whose correlation functions are localized on the scattering equations [16].”
• Scattering on plane waves and the double copy (2017, methodology): “Finally, we note that our original motivation for considering scattering on plane wave backgrounds was to provide a space-time result to compare with an alternative calculation of these amplitudes using ambitwistor string theory [65] adapted to a curved background [66].”
• Infinite tension limit of the pure spinor superstring (2013, methodology): “Abb β −Dbb β Ab m), Fbmn = 1 8 (γmn)b α bβDb βb cWbα, (2.17) and δ(knPn) is an operator of conformal weight (−1,1) defined in the same manner as in the integrated vertex operators of Mason and Skinner [3]. Note that U(z) of (2.15) is manifestly spacetime supersymmetric and is gaugeinvariant under δAα”
• The Kerr-Schild double copy in curved spacetime (2017, methodology): “They further note that this procedure is obtainable from ambitwistor string theory [83] (see also [84, 85]), which would in principle provide a general framework for formulating a similar procedure for different types of background.”
• Black holes and the double copy (2014, background): “Those formulas can be directly obtained from the new ambitwistor string theories, where the distinction between gauge theory and gravity is expressed by a natural choice of worldsheet fields [54,55].”
• Ambitwistor strings and the scattering equations at one loop (2013, methodology): “In particular, as emphasized in [1], the bosonic gauge field e imposes the constraint that P µ is null with respect to the target space metric and the associated transformation δX µ = αP µ instructs us to count as equivalent field configurations that differ only by translation of X along a null…”
• Scattering equations and matrices: from Einstein to Yang-Mills, DBI and NLSM (2014, methodology): “Elegant twistor-string-like models have been constructed from ambitwistor [21] and pure spinor [24] techniques.”
• One-loop amplitudes on the Riemann sphere (2015, methodology): “The derivation of these formulae from ambitwistor string theories [10] led to proposals for formulae for loop amplitudes on higher-genus Riemann surfaces by Adamo, Casali and Skinner (ACS) [23], following the standard string paradigm.”
• Λ scattering equations (2016, background): “1 Introduction The complete tree-level S-matrix of a large variety of field theories of massless particles are now known (or conjectured) to have a description in terms of contour integrals over M0,n, the moduli space of n-punctured Riemann sphere [1–13].”
• Scattering forms and the positive geometry of kinematics, color and the worldsheet (2017, positive): “More recently, we have seen a new interpretation of the same worldsheet structure first in the context of “twistor string theory” [4], and much more generally in the program of “scattering equations” [5, 6], which directly computes the amplitudes for massless particles using a worldsheet but with no”