Self-duality, helicity and background field loopology

Abstract

I show that helicity plays an important role in the development of rules for computing higher loop effective Lagrangians. Specifically, the two-loop Heisenberg-Euler effective Lagrangian in quantum electrodynamics is remarkably simple when the background field has definite helicity (i.e., is self-dual). Furthermore, the two-loop answer can be derived essentially algebraically, and is naturally expressed in terms of one-loop quantities. This represents a generalization of the familiar ``integration-by-parts'' rules for manipulating diagrams involving free propagators to the more complicated case where the propagators are those for scalars or spinors in the presence of a background field.