In recent years, the BCFW construction provided a very powerful tool for computing scattering amplitudes as well as it shed light on the perturbation theory structure. In this talk, I discuss the long-standing issue of the boundary term arising when the amplitudes do not vanish as some momenta are taken to infinity along some complex direction. In particular, we provide a new set of on-shell recursion relations valid for such theories and discuss its consequences on our understanding on the perturbation theory structure of the S-Matrix.

Abstract:We give a proof of BCFW recursion relations for all tree-level amplitudes of gravitons in General Relativity. The proof follows the same basic steps as in the BCFW construction and it is an extension of the one given for next-to-MHV amplitudes by one of the authors and P. Svrček in hep-th/0502160. The main obstacle to overcome is to prove that deformed graviton amplitudes vanish as the complex variable parameterizing the deformation is taken to infinity. This step is done by first proving an auxiliary recursion relation where the vanishing at infinity follows directly from a Feynman diagram analysis. The auxiliary recursion relation gives rise to a representation of gravity amplitudes where the vanishing under the BCFW deformation can be directly proven. Since all our steps are based only on Feynman diagrams, our proof completely establishes the validity of BCFW recursion relations. This means that results in the literature that were derived assuming their validity become true statements.

Using gauge theory/gravity duality we study sound wave propagation in strongly coupled non-conformal gauge theory plasma. We compute the speed of sound and the bulk viscosity of N = 2 * supersymmetric SU(N c ) Yang-Mills plasma at a temperature much larger than the mass scale of the theory in the limit of large N c and large 't Hooft coupling. The speed of sound is computed both from the equation of state and the hydrodynamic pole in the stress-energy tensor two-point correlation function. Both computations lead to the same result. Bulk viscosity is determined by computing the attenuation constant of the sound wave mode.

The N = 2 spinning particle action describes the propagation of antisymmetric tensor fields, including vector fields as a special case. In this paper we study the path integral quantization on a one-dimensional torus of the N = 2 spinning particle coupled to spacetime gravity. The action has a local N = 2 worldline supersymmetry with a gauged U(1) symmetry that includes a Chern-Simons coupling. Its quantization on the torus produces the one-loop effective action for a single antisymmetric tensor. We use this worldline representation to calculate the first few Seeley-DeWitt coefficients for antisymmetric tensor fields of arbitrary rank in arbitrary dimensions. As side results we obtain the correct trace anomaly of a spin 1 particle in four dimensions as well as exact duality relations between differential form gauge fields. This approach yields a drastic simplification over standard heat-kernel methods. It contains on top of the usual proper time a new modular parameter implementing the reduction to a single tensor field. Worldline methods are generically simpler and more efficient in perturbative computations than standard QFT Feynman rules. This is particularly evident when the coupling to gravity is considered.

Gauge theory-string theory duality describes strongly coupled N = 4 supersymmetric SU(n c ) Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature in terms of near extremal black 3-brane geometry in type IIB string theory. We use this correspondence to compute the leading correction in inverse 't Hooft coupling to the shear diffusion constant, bulk viscosity and the speed of sound in the large-n c N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory plasma. The transport coefficients are extracted from the dispersion relation for the shear and the sound wave lowest quasinormal modes in the leading order α ′ -corrected black D3 brane geometry. We find the shear viscosity extracted from the shear diffusion constant to agree with result of [hep-th/0406264]; also, the leading correction to bulk viscosity and the speed of sound vanishes. Our computation provides a highly nontrivial consistency check on the hydrodynamic description of the α ′ -corrected nonextremal black branes in string theory.