Light-by-light scattering at three loops in massless QCD and QED: amplitudes and cross sections

A bstract We present the calculation of three-loop massless QCD and QED helicity amplitudes for light-by-light scattering. We make use of Lorentz tensor decomposition in the ’t Hooft-Veltman dimensional regularisation scheme to reduce the complexity of the computation. Our analytic amplitude results are remarkably compact and can be efficiently evaluated numerically. We employ them to compute the corresponding NNLO differential cross-section predictions in the invariant mass and rapidity distributions of the di-photon system, for which we find agreement with the experimental ATLAS data from ultra-peripheral heavy-ion collisions.