Off-shell Ward identities for N-gluon amplitudes

Off-shell Ward identities in non-abelian gauge theory continue to be a subject of active research, since they are, in general, inhomogeneous and their form depends on the chosen gauge-fixing procedure. For the three-gluon and four-gluon vertices, it is known that a relatively simple form of the Ward identity can be achieved using the pinch technique or, equivalently, the background-field method with quantum Feynman gauge. The latter is also the gauge-fixing underlying the string-inspired formalism, and here we use this formalism to prove the corresponding form of the Ward identity for the one-loop N-gluon amplitudes.