Differential equations on unitarity cut surfaces

Abstract

We reformulate differential equations (DEs) for Feynman integrals to avoid doubled propagators in intermediate steps. External momentum derivatives are dressed with loop momentum derivatives to form tangent vectors to unitarity cut surfaces, in a way inspired by unitarity-compatible IBP reduction. For the one-loop box, our method directly produces the final DEs without any integration-by-parts reduction. We further illustrate the method by deriving maximal-cut level differential equations for two-loop nonplanar five-point integrals, whose exact expressions are yet unknown. We speed up the computation using finite field techniques and rational function reconstruction.

Comments: 17 pages, 3 figures; v2: added more results and references, final journal version