Structure of infrared singularities of gauge-theory amplitudes at three and four loops

Abstract

The infrared divergences of massless n-parton scattering amplitudes can be derived from the anomalous dimension of n-jet operators in soft-collinear effective theory. Up to three-loop order, the latter has been shown to have a very simple structure: it contains pairwise color-dipole interactions among the external partons, governed by the cusp anomalous dimension and a logarithm of the kinematic invariants s_{ij}, plus a possible three-loop correlation involving four particles, which is described by a yet unknown function of conformal cross ratios of kinematic invariants. This function is constrained by two-particle collinear limits and by the known behavior of amplitudes in the high-energy limit. We construct a class of relatively simple functions satisfying these constraints. We also extend the analysis to four-loop order, finding that three additional four-particle correlations and a single five-particle correlation appear, which again are governed by functions of conformal cross ratios. Our results suggest that the dipole conjecture, which states that only two-particle color-dipole correlations appear in the anomalous dimension, may need to be generalized. We present a weaker form of the conjecture, stating that to all orders in perturbation theory corrections to the dipole formula are governed by functions of conformal cross ratios, and are O(1/N_c^2) suppressed relative to the dipole term. If true, this conjecture implies that the cusp anomalous dimension obeys Casimir scaling to all orders in perturbation theory.