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

The amplituhedron from momentum twistor diagrams

We propose a new diagrammatic formulation of the all-loop scattering amplitudes/Wilson loops in planar N=4 SYM, dubbed the "momentum-twistor diagrams". These are on-shell-diagrams obtained by gluing trivalent black and white vertices defined in momentum twistor space, which, in the reduced diagram case, are known to be related to diagrams in the original twistor space. The new diagrams are manifestly Yangian invariant, and they naturally represent factorization and forward-limit contributions in the all-loop BCFW recursion relations in momentum twistor space, in a fashion that is completely different from those in momentum space. We show how to construct and evaluate momentum-twistor diagrams, and how to use them to obtain tree-level amplitudes and loop-level integrands; in particular for the latter we identify an isolated bubble-structure for each loop variable, arising from a forward limit, or entangled removal of particles. From a given diagram one can directly read off the C, D matrices via a generalized "boundary measurement"; this in turn determines a cell in the amplituhedron associated with the amplitude, and our diagrammatic representations of the amplitude can provide triangulations of the amplituhedron with generally very intricate geometries. To demonstrate the computational power of the formalism, we give explicit results for general two-loop integrands, and the cells of the complete amplituhedron for two-loop MHV amplitudes.Comment: 39 pages, 34 figure