1,327 research outputs found
Scattering Forms and the Positive Geometry of Kinematics, Color and the Worldsheet
The search for a theory of the S-Matrix has revealed surprising geometric
structures underlying amplitudes ranging from the worldsheet to the
amplituhedron, but these are all geometries in auxiliary spaces as opposed to
kinematic space where amplitudes live. In this paper, we propose a novel
geometric understanding of amplitudes for a large class of theories. The key is
to think of amplitudes as differential forms directly on kinematic space. We
explore this picture for a wide range of massless theories in general spacetime
dimensions. For the bi-adjoint cubic scalar, we establish a direct connection
between its "scattering form" and a classic polytope--the associahedron--known
to mathematicians since the 1960's. We find an associahedron living naturally
in kinematic space, and the tree amplitude is simply the "canonical form"
associated with this "positive geometry". Basic physical properties such as
locality, unitarity and novel "soft" limits are fully determined by the
geometry. Furthermore, the moduli space for the open string worldsheet has also
long been recognized as an associahedron. We show that the scattering equations
act as a diffeomorphism between this old "worldsheet associahedron" and the new
"kinematic associahedron", providing a geometric interpretation and novel
derivation of the bi-adjoint CHY formula. We also find "scattering forms" on
kinematic space for Yang-Mills and the Non-linear Sigma Model, which are dual
to the color-dressed amplitudes despite having no explicit color factors. This
is possible due to a remarkable fact--"Color is Kinematics"--whereby kinematic
wedge products in the scattering forms satisfy the same Jacobi relations as
color factors. Finally, our scattering forms are well-defined on the
projectivized kinematic space, a property that provides a geometric origin for
color-kinematics duality.Comment: 77 pages, 25 figures; v2, corrected discussion of worldsheet
associahedron canonical for
Scattering Amplitudes and Toric Geometry
In this paper we provide a first attempt towards a toric geometric
interpretation of scattering amplitudes. In recent investigations it has indeed
been proposed that the all-loop integrand of planar N=4 SYM can be represented
in terms of well defined finite objects called on-shell diagrams drawn on
disks. Furthermore it has been shown that the physical information of on-shell
diagrams is encoded in the geometry of auxiliary algebraic varieties called the
totally non negative Grassmannians. In this new formulation the infinite
dimensional symmetry of the theory is manifest and many results, that are quite
tricky to obtain in terms of the standard Lagrangian formulation of the theory,
are instead manifest. In this paper, elaborating on previous results, we
provide another picture of the scattering amplitudes in terms of toric
geometry. In particular we describe in detail the toric varieties associated to
an on-shell diagram, how the singularities of the amplitudes are encoded in
some subspaces of the toric variety, and how this picture maps onto the
Grassmannian description. Eventually we discuss the action of cluster
transformations on the toric varieties. The hope is to provide an alternative
description of the scattering amplitudes that could contribute in the
developing of this very interesting field of research.Comment: 58 pages, 25 figures, typos corrected, a reference added, to be
published in JHE
Polytopality and Cartesian products of graphs
We study the question of polytopality of graphs: when is a given graph the
graph of a polytope? We first review the known necessary conditions for a graph
to be polytopal, and we provide several families of graphs which satisfy all
these conditions, but which nonetheless are not graphs of polytopes. Our main
contribution concerns the polytopality of Cartesian products of non-polytopal
graphs. On the one hand, we show that products of simple polytopes are the only
simple polytopes whose graph is a product. On the other hand, we provide a
general method to construct (non-simple) polytopal products whose factors are
not polytopal.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure
An Implicitization Challenge for Binary Factor Analysis
We use tropical geometry to compute the multidegree and Newton polytope of
the hypersurface of a statistical model with two hidden and four observed
binary random variables, solving an open question stated by Drton, Sturmfels
and Sullivant in "Lectures on Algebraic Statistics" (Problem 7.7). The model is
obtained from the undirected graphical model of the complete bipartite graph
by marginalizing two of the six binary random variables. We present
algorithms for computing the Newton polytope of its defining equation by
parallel walks along the polytope and its normal fan. In this way we compute
vertices of the polytope. Finally, we also compute and certify its facets by
studying tangent cones of the polytope at the symmetry classes vertices. The
Newton polytope has 17214912 vertices in 44938 symmetry classes and 70646
facets in 246 symmetry classes.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figures, presented at Mega 09 (Barcelona, Spain
An extensive English language bibliography on graph theory and its applications, supplement 1
Graph theory and its applications - bibliography, supplement
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