D3-brane loop amplitudes from M5-brane tree amplitudes

Abstract We study loop corrections to scattering amplitudes in the world-volume theory of a probe D3-brane, which is described by the supersymmetric Dirac-Born-Infeld theory. We show that the D3-brane loop superamplitudes can be obtained from the tree-level superamplitudes in the world-volume theory of a probe M5-brane (or D5-brane). The M5-brane theory describes self-interactions of an abelian tensor supermultiplet with (2, 0) supersymmetry, and the tree-level superamplitudes are given by a twistor formula. We apply the construction to the maximally-helicity-violating (MHV) amplitudes in the D3- brane theory at one-loop order, which are purely rational terms (except for the four-point amplitude). The results are further confirmed by generalised unitarity methods. Through a supersymmetry reduction on the M5-brane tree-level superamplitudes, we also construct one-loop corrections to the non-supersymmetric D3-brane amplitudes, which agree with the known results in the literature.