Infrared singularities of scattering amplitudes in perturbative QCD

Abstract

An exact formula is derived for the infrared singularities of dimensionally regularized scattering amplitudes in massless QCD with an arbitrary number of legs, valid at any number of loops. It is based on the conjecture that the anomalous-dimension matrix of n-jet operators in soft-collinear effective theory contains only a single non-trivial color structure, whose coefficient is the cusp anomalous dimension of Wilson loops with light-like segments. Its color-diagonal part is characterized by two anomalous dimensions, which are extracted to three-loop order from known perturbative results for the quark and gluon form factors. This allows us to predict the three-loop coefficients of all 1/epsilon^k poles for an arbitrary n-parton scattering amplitudes, generalizing existing two-loop results.Comment: 4 pages; v2: typo in eq. (12) fixed, references updated; v3: additional term in (12