Explicit calculation of multi-fold contour integrals of certain ratios of Euler gamma functions. Part 1

In this paper, we proceed to study properties of Mellin–Barnes (MB) transforms of Usyukina–Davydychev (UD) functions. In our previous papers (Allendes et al., 2013 [13], Kniehl et al., 2013 [14]), we showed that multi-fold Mellin–Barnes (MB) transforms of Usyukina–Davydychev (UD) functions may be reduced to two-fold MB transforms and that the higher-order UD functions may be obtained in terms of a differential operator by applying it to a slightly modified first UD function. The result is valid in d=4 dimensions, and its analog in d=4−2ε dimensions exits, too (Gonzalez and Kondrashuk, 2013 [6]). In Allendes et al. (2013) [13], the chain of recurrence relations for analytically regularized UD functions was obtained implicitly by comparing the left-hand side and the right-hand side of the diagrammatic relations between the diagrams with different loop orders. In turn, these diagrammatic relations were obtained using the method of loop reduction for the triangle ladder diagrams proposed in 1983 by Belokurov and Usyukina. Here, we reproduce these recurrence relations by calculating explicitly, via Barnes lemmas, the contour integrals produced by the left-hand sides of the diagrammatic relations. In this a way, we explicitly calculate a family of multi-fold contour integrals of certain ratios of Euler gamma functions. We make a conjecture that similar results for the contour integrals are valid for a wider family of smooth functions, which includes the MB transforms of UD functions.