Enumerating higher-dimensional operators with on-shell amplitudes

2020

We establish a simple formula for the minimal dimension of operators leading to any helicity amplitude. It eases the systematic enumeration of independent operators from the construction of massless non-factorizable on-shell amplitudes. Little-group constraints can then be solved algorithmically for each helicity configuration to extract a complete set of spinor structures with lowest dimension. Occasionally, further reduction using momentum conservation, on-shell conditions and Schouten identities is required. A systematic procedure to account for the latter is presented. Dressing spinor structures with dot products of momenta finally yields the independent Lorentz structures for each heli…