Holonomies of gauge fields in twistor space 4: Functional MHV rules and one-loop amplitudes

Abstract

We consider generalization of the Cachazo–Svrcek–Witten (CSW) rules to one-loop amplitudes of N = 4 super Yang–Mills theory in a recently developed holonomy formalism in twistor space. We first reconsider off-shell continuation of the Lorentz-invariant Nair measure for the incorporation of loop integrals. We then formulate an S-matrix functional for general amplitudes such that it implements the CSW rules at quantum level. For one-loop MHV amplitudes, the S-matrix functional correctly reproduces the analytic expressions obtained in the Brandhuber–Spence–Travaglini (BST) method. Motivated by this result, we propose a novel regularization scheme by use of an iterated-integral representation of polylogarithms and obtain a set of new analytic expressions for one-loop NMHV and N 2MHV amplitudes in a conjectural form. We also briefly sketch how the extension to one-loop non-MHV amplitudes in general can be carried out.