Off-Shell Spinor-Helicity Amplitudes from Light-Cone Deformation Procedure

Abstract: We study the consistency conditions for interactions of massless fields of any spin in four-dimensional flat space using the light-cone approach. We show that they can be equivalently rewritten as the Ward identities for the off-shell light-cone amplitudes built from the light-cone Hamiltonian in the standard way. Then we find a general solution of these Ward identities. The solution admits a compact representation when written in the spinor-helicity form and is given by an arbitrary function of spinor products, satisfying well-known homogeneity constraints. Thus, we show that the light-cone consistent deformation procedure inevitably leads to a certain off-shell version of the spinor-helicity approach. We discuss how the relation between the two approaches can be employed to facilitate the search of consistent interaction of massless higher-spin fields.