English

Five W-boson amplitude = near-null decagon

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-10-21 v1

Abstract

We study a five-leg scattering amplitude on the special Coulomb branch of planar N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. We reach this point of the moduli space of scalar vacuum expectation values by considering six-dimensional N=(1,1) super Yang-Mills theory and reducing it down to four space-time dimensions with extra-dimensional momenta being nonvanishing. This branch is characterized by massive external W-bosons and massless internal gluons propagating in loops. We analyze the five W-boson amplitude in the kinematics when their masses are much smaller than all Mandelstam-like invariants. This is what we dub the near mass-shell limit. We perform calculations to two-loop order in 't Hooft coupling, making use of recent advances in analytic calculations of required Feynman integrals. Our findings confirm exponentiation of infrared logarithms and enable us to conjecture a concise all-order expression for the amplitude in question. We further analyze its duality to the `square root' of a five-point correlation function of infinitely-heavy half-BPS operators, known as the decagon. By considering the near-null limit for inter-operators distances, we verify that the two objects coincide. This observation corroborates the novel Coulomb amplitudes/heavy correlator duality previously observed for four W-boson amplitudes and Sudakov form factors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.16471,
  title  = {Five W-boson amplitude = near-null decagon},
  author = {A. V. Belitsky and L. V. Bork and R. N. Lee and A. I. Onishchenko and V. A. Smirnov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.16471},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

24 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:44:55.310Z