Prescriptionless light-cone integrals

Abstract

Perturbative quantum gauge field theory seen within the perspective of physical gauge choices such as the light-cone entails the emergence of troublesome poles of the type $(k\cdot n)^{-\alpha}$ in the Feynman integrals, and these come from the boson field propagator, where $\alpha = 1,2,...$ and $n^{\mu}$ is the external arbitrary four-vector that defines the gauge proper. This becomes an additional hurdle to overcome in the computation of Feynman diagrams, since any graph containing internal boson lines will inevitably produce integrands with denominators bearing the characteristic gauge-fixing factor. How one deals with them has been the subject of research for over decades, and several prescriptions have been suggested and tried in the course of time, with failures and successes. However, a more recent development in this front which applies the negative dimensional technique to compute light-cone Feynman integrals shows that we can altogether dispense with prescriptions to perform the calculations. An additional bonus comes attached to this new technique in that not only it renders the light-cone prescriptionless, but by the very nature of it, can also dispense with decomposition formulas or partial fractioning tricks used in the standard approach to separate pole products of the type $(k\cdot n)^{-\alpha}[(k-p)\cdot n]^{-\beta}$, $(\beta = 1,2,...)$. In this work we demonstrate how all this can be done.