Expanding Einstein-Yang-Mills by Yang-Mills in CHY frame

Abstract Using the Cachazo-He-Yuan (CHY) formalism, we prove a recursive expansion of tree level single trace Einstein-Yang-Mills (EYM) amplitudes with an arbitrary number of gluons and gravitons, which is valid for general spacetime dimensions and any helicity configurations. The recursion is written in terms of fewer-graviton EYM amplitudes and pure Yang-Mills (YM) amplitudes, which can be further carried out until we reach an expansion in terms of pure YM amplitudes in Kleiss-Kuijf (KK) basis. Our expansion then generates naturally a spanning tree structure rooted on gluons whose vertices are gravitons. We further propose a set of graph theoretical rules based on spanning trees that evaluate directly the pure YM expansion coefficients