A covariant representation of the Ball–Chiu vertex Original Research Article

In nonabelian gauge theory the three-gluon vertex function contains important structural information, in particular on infrared divergences, and is also an essential ingredient in the Schwinger–Dyson equations. Much effort has gone into analyzing its general structure, and at the one-loop level also a number of explicit computations have been done, using various approaches. Here we use the string-inspired formalism to unify the calculations of the scalar, spinor and gluon loop contributions to the one-loop vertex, leading to an extremely compact representation in all cases. The vertex is computed fully off-shell and in dimensionally continued form, so that it can be used as a building block for higher-loop calculations. We find that the Bern–Kosower loop replacement rules, originally derived for the on-shell case, hold off-shell as well. We explain the relation of the structure of this representation to the low-energy effective action, and establish the precise connection with the standard Ball–Chiu decomposition of the vertex. This allows us also to predict that the vanishing of the completely antisymmetric coefficient function S of this decomposition is not a one-loop accident, but persists at higher-loop orders. The sum rule found by Binger and Brodsky, which leads to the vanishing of the one-loop vertex in image SYM theory, in the present approach relates to worldline supersymmetry.