The symbol and alphabet of two-loop NMHV amplitudes from $\bar{Q}$ equations

Abstract

We study the symbol and the alphabet for two-loop NMHV amplitudes in planar ${\cal N}=4$ super-Yang-Mills from the $\bar{Q}$ equations, which provide a first-principle method for computing multi-loop amplitudes. Starting from one-loop N${}^2$MHV ratio functions, we explain in detail how to use $\bar{Q}$ equations to obtain the total differential of two-loop $n$-point NMHV amplitudes, whose symbol contains letters that are algebraic functions of kinematics for $n\geq 8$. We present explicit formula with nice patterns for the part of the symbol involving algebraic letters for all multiplicities, and we find $17-2m$ multiplicative-independent letters for a given square root of Gram determinant, with $0\leq m\leq 4$ depending on the number of particles involved in the square root. We also observe that these algebraic letters can be found as poles of one-loop four-mass leading singularities with MHV or NMHV trees. As a byproduct of our algebraic results, we find a large class of components of two-loop NMHV, which can be written as differences of two double-pentagon integrals, particularly simple and absent of square roots. As an example, we present the complete symbol for $n=9$ whose alphabet contains $59\times 9$ rational letters, in addition to the $11 \times 9$ independent algebraic ones. We also give all-loop NMHV last-entry conditions for all multiplicities.