Expansion of EYM Amplitudes in Gauge Invariant Vector Space

Abstract: Motivated by the problem of expanding single-trace tree-level amplitude of Einstein-Yang-Mills theory to the BCJ basis of Yang-Mills amplitudes, we present an alternative expansion formula in the gauge invariant vector space. Starting from a generic vector space consisting of polynomials of momenta and polarization vectors, we define a new sub-space as gauge invariant vector space by imposing constraints of gauge invariant conditions. To characterize this sub-space, we compute its dimension and construct an explicit gauge invariant basis from it. We propose an expansion formula in the gauge invariant basis with expansion coefficients being linear combinations of Yang-Mills amplitude, manifesting the gauge invariance of both expansion basis and coefficients. With help of quivers, we compute the expansion coefficients via differential operators and demonstrate the general expansion algorithm by several examples.