Paper detail

The Supersymmetry of Cuts in Pure Gauge Theory and Gravity

At tree-level, scattering amplitudes involving only gluons or gravitons are unaffected by supersymmetry, allowing them to be efficiently encoded by and extracted from those of maximally supersymmetric (N=4,8) theories. This fails beyond tree-level, of course, but much less than would be expected. We show that all the leading singularities of (sub-maximally or) non-supersymmetric theories can be organized into `generalized' superfunctions, in terms of which all helicity components can be effectively encoded. These functions differ from those of maximally supersymmetric theories by an extent determined by loop-order -- broken into a sum over 2^L supersymmetric pieces.