On-shell diagrammatics and the perturbative structure of planar gauge theories

Abstract

We discuss the on-shell diagrammatic representation of theories less special than maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills. In particular, we focus on planar $\mathcal{N}\,\le\,2$ gauge theories, including pure Yang-Mills. For such a class of theories, the on-shell diagrammatics is endowed with a decoration which carries the information on the helicity of the coherent states. In the first part of the paper we extensively discuss the properties of this decorated diagrammatics. Particular relevance have the helicity flows that the decoration induces on the diagrams, which allows to identify the different classes of singularities and, consequentely, the singularity structure of the on-shell processes. The second part of the paper establishes a link between the decorated on-shell diagrammatics and the scattering amplitudes for the theories under examination. We prove that an all-loop recursion relation at integrand level holds also for $\mathcal{N}\,=\,1,\,2$, while for $\mathcal{N}\,=\,0$ we are able to set up a preliminary analysis at one loop. In both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric case, the treatment of the forward limit is subtle. We provide a fully on-shell analysis of it which is crucial for the proof of the all-loop recursion relation and for the analysis of pure Yang-Mills.