Scattering in Instanton Backgrounds
Abstract
In this letter we evaluate one-loop all-plus gluon amplitudes of gauge theory with fundamental fermions in the presence of a flavour instanton background. Fermion zero modes are regulated with a chiral mass term. This computation is performed by cancelling a twistorial 't Hooft anomaly via the Green-Schwarz mechanism. We find that the trace-ordered amplitude has the form of a Parke-Taylor factor multiplied by the Fourier transform of the instanton density evaluated on the total momentum of the gluons. A background flavour instanton modifies the leading soft gluon and photon theorem, generating a level equal to twice the instanton charge in the soft Kac-Moody symmetry. We discuss the implications of our results for amplitudes in the presence of dynamical instantons.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.17538,
title = {Scattering in Instanton Backgrounds},
author = {Roland Bittleston and Kevin Costello},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.17538},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
6 pages + 8 pages supplementary material