📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

Are perturbative superstring amplitudes for massless external states just an $\alpha'$ dressing of super-Yang-Mills/supergravity? This is the case at tree level, where the worldsheet correlators at $n$ points can be written in a natural worldsheet basis, such that the kinematic coefficients are BCJ numerators of super-Yang-Mills/supergravity amplitudes, with the non-trivial $\alpha'$ dependence carried only by the Koba-Nielsen factor. Motivated by this construction, we present for the first time a complete worldsheet basis of one-loop superstring correlators at $n$ points. All the kinematic coefficients associated to non-cusp basis elements are identified with pieces of one-loop BCJ numerators of super-Yang-Mills/supergravity. This determines the superstring correlators up to 15 points in terms of field theory. Starting at 16 points (modular weight 12), the worldsheet basis may include cusp forms, which vanish in the field-theory degeneration, such that the associated coefficients cannot be fixed in this manner. Therefore, the one-loop answer to our initial question is determined, at high multiplicity, by whether the coefficients of cusp basis elements vanish or not. As a by-product of our construction, we present new constraints on the field-theory limit that result from string modularity. These are expressed as additional relations among one-loop BCJ numerators in maximal super-Yang-Mills/supergravity starting at 6 points.