Gluonic evanescent operators: classification and one-loop renormalization

Evanescent operators are a special class of operators that vanish classically in four-dimensional spacetime, while in general dimensions they are non-zero and are expected to have non-trivial physical effects at the quantum loop level in dimensional regularization. In this paper we initiate the study of evanescent operators in pure Yang-Mills theory. We develop a systematic method for classifying and constructing the d-dimensional Lorentz invariant evanescent operators, which start to appear at mass dimension ten. We also compute one-loop form factors for the dimension-ten operators via the d-dimensional unitarity method and obtain their one-loop anomalous dimensions. These operators are necessary ingredients in the study of high dimensional operators in effective field theories involving a Yang-Mills sector.