Ladder and zig-zag Feynman diagrams, operator formalism and conformal triangles

Abstract

We develop an operator approach to the evaluation of multiple integrals for multiloop Feynman massless diagrams. A commutative family of graph building operators $H_\alpha$ for ladder diagrams is constructed and investigated. The complete set of eigenfunctions and the corresponding eigenvalues for the operators $H_\alpha$ are found. This enables us to explicitly express a wide class of four-point ladder diagrams and a general two-loop propagator-type master diagram (with arbitrary indices on the lines) as Mellin-Barnes-type integrals. Special cases of these integrals are explicitly evaluated. A certain class of zig-zag four-point and two-point planar Feynman diagrams (relevant to the bi-scalar $D$-dimensional "fishnet" field theory and to the calculation of the $\beta$-function in $\phi^4$-theory) is considered. The graph building operators and convenient integral representations for these Feynman diagrams are obtained. The explicit form of the eigenfunctions for the graph building operators of the zig-zag diagrams is fixed by conformal symmetry and these eigenfunctions coincide with the 3-point correlation functions in $D$-dimensional conformal field theories. By means of this approach, we exactly evaluate the diagrams of the zig-zag series in special cases. In particular, we find a fairly simple derivation of the values for the zig-zag multi-loop two-point diagrams for $D=4$. The role of conformal symmetry in this approach, especially a connection of the considered graph building operators with conformal invariant solutions of the Yang-Baxter equation is investigated in detail.