On the evaluation of a certain class of Feynman diagrams in x-space: Sunrise-type topologies at any loop order

We review recently developed new powerful techniques to compute a class of Feynman diagrams at any loop order, known as sunrise-type diagrams. These sunrise-type topologies have many important applications in many different fields of physics and we believe it to be timely to discuss their evaluation from a unified point of view. The method is based on the analysis of the diagrams directly in configuration space which, in the case of the sunrise-type diagrams and diagrams related to them, leads to enormous simplifications as compared to the traditional evaluation of loops in momentum space. We present explicit formulae for their analytical evaluation for arbitrary mass configurations and arbitrary dimensions at any loop order. We discuss several limiting cases in their kinematical regimes which are e.g. relevant for applications in HQET and NRQCD. We completely solve the problem of renormalization using simple formulae for the counterterms within dimensional regularization. An important application is the computation of the multi-particle phase space in D-dimensional space-time which we discuss. We present some examples of their numerical evaluation in the general case of D-dimensional space-time as well as in integer dimensions D = D0 for different values of dimensions including the most important practical cases D0 = 2, 3, 4. Substantial simplifications occur for odd integer space-time dimensions where the final results can be expressed in closed form through elementary functions. We discuss the use of recurrence relations naturally emerging in configuration space for the calculation of special series of integrals of the sunrise topology. We finally report on results for the computation of an extension of the basic sunrise topology, namely the spectacle topology and the topology where an irreducible loop is added.