A Tale of Two Loops: Simplifying All-Plus Yang-Mills Amplitudes

Abstract

Pure Yang-Mills amplitudes with all external gluons carrying positive helicity, known as all-plus amplitudes, have an especially simple structure. The tree amplitudes vanish and, up to at least two loops, the loop-level amplitudes are related to those of $\mathcal{N}=4$ super-Yang-Mills (SYM) theory. This makes all-plus amplitudes a useful testing ground for new methods of simplifying more general classes of amplitudes. In this thesis we consider three new approaches, focusing on the structure before integration.

Comments: PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, July 2017