Recursion relations and scattering amplitudes in the light-front formalism

Abstract

The fragmentation functions and scattering amplitudes are investigated in the framework of light-front perturbation theory. It is demonstrated that, the factorization property of the fragmentation functions implies the recursion relations for the off-shell scattering amplitudes which are light-front analogs of the Berends-Giele relations. These recursion relations on the light-front can be solved exactly by induction and it is shown that the expressions for the off-shell light-front amplitudes are represented as a linear combinations of the on-shell amplitudes. By putting external particles on-shell we recover the scattering amplitudes previously derived in the literature.