Recursion Relation for Boundary Contribution

Abstract

It is well known that under a BCFW-deformation, there is a boundary contribution when the amplitude scales as O(1) or worse. We show that boundary contributions have a similar recursion relation as scattering amplitude. Just like the BCFW recursion relation, where scattering amplitudes are expressed as the products of two on-shell sub-amplitudes (plus possible boundary contributions), our new recursion relation expresses boundary contributions as products of sub-amplitudes and boundary contributions with less legs, plus yet another possible boundary contribution. In other words, the complete scattering amplitude, including boundary contributions, can be obtained by multiple steps of recursions, unless the boundary contributions are still non-zero when all possible deformations are exploited. We demonstrate this algorithm by several examples. Especially, we show that for standard model like renormalizable theory in 4D, i.e., the theory including only gauge boson, fermions and scalars, the complete amplitude can always be computed by at most four recursive steps using our algorithm.