Abstract
We compute the leading probability for a gluon to flip helicity state upon traversing a background plane wave gauge field in pure Yang-Mills theory and QCD, with an arbitrary number of colours and flavours. This is a one-loop calculation in perturbative gauge theory around the gluonic plane wave background, which is treated without approximation (i.e., to all orders in the coupling). We introduce a background-dressed version of the spinor helicity formalism and use it to obtain simple formulae for the flip amplitude with pure external gluon polarizations. We also give in-depth examples for gauge group SU(2), and evaluate both the high- and low-energy limits. Throughout, we compare and contrast with the calculation of photon helicity flip in strong-field QED.
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Adamo, T., Ilderton, A. Gluon helicity flip in a plane wave background. J. High Energ. Phys. 2019, 15 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2019)015
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2019)015