Anomalous Ward identities for on-shell amplitudes at the conformal fixed point
Dmitry Chicherin (LAPTh, Université Savoie Mont Blanc, CNRS, Annecy-le-Vieux, F-74941, France); Johannes Henn (Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, Werner-Heisenberg-Institut, München, D-80805, Germany); Simone Zoia (Dipartimento di Fisica and Arnold-Regge Center, Università di Torino, and INFN, Sezione di Torino, Via P. Giuria 1, Torino, I-10125, Italy)
Conformal symmetry underlies many massless quantum field theories, but little is known about the consequences of this powerful symmetry for on-shell scattering amplitudes. Working in a dimensionally-regularised ϕ 3 model at the conformal fixed point, we show that the on-shell renormalised amplitudes satisfy anomalous conformal Ward identities. Each external on-shell state contributes two terms to the anomaly. The first term is proportional to the elementary field anomalous dimension, and thus involves only lower-loop information. We show that the second term can be given as the convolution of a universal collinear function and lower-order amplitudes. The computation of the conformal anomaly is therefore simpler than that of the amplitude at the same perturbative order, which gives our anomalous conformal Ward identities a strong predictive power in perturbation theory. Finally, we show that our result is also of practical importance for dimensionally-regularised amplitudes away from the conformal fixed point.