A numerical evaluation of planar two-loop helicity amplitudes for a W-boson plus four partons

Abstract

We present the first numerical results for the two-loop helicity amplitudes for the scattering of four partons and a W-boson in QCD. We use a finite field sampling method to reduce directly from Feynman diagrams to the coefficients of a set of master integrals after applying integration-by-parts identities. Since the basis of master integrals is not yet fully known analytically, we identify a set of master integrals with a simple divergence structure using local numerator insertions. This allows for accurate numerical evaluation of the amplitude using sector decomposition methods.