Graviton Amplitudes from Collinear Limits of Gauge Amplitudes

We express all tree-level graviton amplitudes in Einstein's gravity as the collinear limits of a linear combination of pure Yang-Mills amplitudes in which each graviton is represented by two gauge bosons, each of them carrying exactly one half of graviton's momentum and helicity.Comment: 7 pages, harvma

Graviton as a Pair of Collinear Gauge Bosons

We show that the mixed gravitational/gauge superstring amplitudes describing decays of massless closed strings - gravitons or dilatons - into a number of gauge bosons, can be written at the tree (disk) level as linear combinations of pure open string amplitudes in which the graviton (or dilaton) is replaced by a pair of collinear gauge bosons. Each of the constituent gauge bosons carry exactly one half of the original closed string momentum, while their +/- 1 helicities add up to +/- 2 for the graviton or to 0 for the dilaton.Comment: 10 pages, harvmac; v2: references adde

Subleading Terms in the Collinear Limit of Yang-Mills Amplitudes

For two massless particles i and j, the collinear limit is a special kinematic configuration in which the particles propagate with parallel four-momentum vectors, with the total momentum P distributed as p_i=xP and p_j=(1-x)P, so that s_{ij}=(p_i+p_j)^2=P^2=0. In Yang-Mills theory, if i and j are among N gauge bosons participating in a scattering process, it is well known that the partial amplitudes associated to the (single trace) group factors with adjacent i and j are singular in the collinear limit and factorize at the leading order into N-1-particle amplitudes times the universal, x-dependent Altarelli-Parisi factors. We give a precise definition of the collinear limit and show that at the tree level, the subleading, non-singular terms are related to the amplitudes with a single graviton inserted instead of two collinear gauge bosons. To that end, we argue that in one-graviton Einstein-Yang-Mills amplitudes, the graviton with momentum P can be replaced by a pair of collinear gauge bosons carrying arbitrary momentum fractions xP and (1-x)P.Comment: 8 page