MHV scattering of gluons and gravitons in chiral strong fields

Abstract

We present all-multiplicity formulae for the tree-level scattering of gluons and gravitons in the maximal helicity violating (MHV) helicity configuration, calculated in certain chiral strong fields. The strong backgrounds we consider are self-dual plane waves in gauge theory and general relativity, which are treated exactly and admit a well-defined S-matrix. The gauge theory background-coupled MHV amplitude is simply a dressed analogue of the familiar Parke-Taylor formula, but the gravitational version has non-trivial new structures due to graviton tails. Both formulae have just one residual integral rather than the $n-2$ expected at $n$-points from space-time perturbation theory; this simplification arises from the integrability of self-dual backgrounds and their corresponding twistor description. The resulting formulae pass several consistency checks and limit to the well-known expressions for MHV scattering of gluons and gravitons when the background becomes trivial.