Anastasia Volovich

A bstract: We show that cosmological wavefunction coefficients associated with n -site chain and loop graphs for a cubic scalar theory in de Sitter spacetime have symbol alphabets given by subsets of A _{2 n− 2} and B _{2 n− 1} cluster variables, respectively, and satisfy the associated cluster adjacency properties. The key step in proving this is identifying a precise connection between graph “tubings” that appear in the kinematic flow equation and polygon “triangulations” that encode the combinatorics of cluster compatibility. Our results imply that cosmological wavefunction coefficients in a general power-law FRW cosmology satisfy cluster adjacency to all orders in the ϵ expansion around the de Sitter limit. We use this information as bootstrap input to show that de Sitter symbols for n ≤ 4 are uniquely determined by simple physical constraints.

A bstract: Recent work has uncovered a connection between the symbol letters of general massless scattering and (permutations of) cluster variables of partial flag varieties. In this paper we explore the cluster adjacency of tree-level gluon amplitudes, specifically focusing on split-helicity amplitudes which can be written in closed form in terms of zigzag diagrams. We check in several cases, and conjecture in general, that the poles in each term satisfy cluster adjacency under a set of permutations that is built from arc permutations of the corresponding zigzag.

A bstract: The amplitudes of the non-linear sigma model can be obtained from those of Tr(Φ ³ ) theory by sending the kinematic (Mandelstam) variables to infinity in a certain direction. In this paper we characterize the behavior of Tr(Φ ³ ) amplitudes under a general class of large kinematic shifts called g -vector shifts. The objects that live in this world at infinity retain certain key amplitude-like properties, most notably factorization, and admit descriptions in terms of polytopes, but they are not generally amplitudes of any cognizable theory. We identify particular g -vector shifts that lead at infinity to mixed amplitudes involving two pions and any number of scalars, allowing us to provide polytopal descriptions of these amplitudes.

A bstract: Motivated by the recent discovery of hidden zeros in particle and string amplitudes, we characterize zeros of individual graph contributions to the cosmological wavefunction of a scalar field theory. We demonstrate that these contributions factorize near these zeros for all tree graphs and provide evidence that this extends to loop graphs as well. We explicitly construct polytopal realizations of the relevant graph associahedra and show that the cosmological zeros have natural geometric and physical interpretations. As a byproduct, we establish an equivalence between the wavefunction coefficients of chain graphs and flat-space Tr( ϕ ³ ) amplitudes, enabling us to leverage the cosmological zeros to uncover the recently discovered hidden zeros of colored amplitudes.

We use partial wave unitarity to constrain various bespoke four-point amplitudes. We start by constructing bespoke generalizations of the type-I superstring amplitude, which we show satisfy dual resonance and have suitable high-energy limits. By analyzing the behavior of partial wave coefficients for highly massive states, we strictly rule out all bespoke amplitudes with asymptotically nonlinear Regge trajectories and place constraints on the first few nontrivial parameters in asymptotically linear cases. Finally, we argue that while a large class of unitary bespoke amplitudes fails to satisfy Regge sum rules, there exists a smaller subclass with a vanishing mass gap that is superpolynomially bounded. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Arkani-Hamed and collaborators have recently shown that scattering amplitudes for colored theories can be expressed as integrals over combinatorial objects simply constructed from surfaces decorated by kinematic data. In this paper we extend the curve integral formalism to theories with colored fermionic matter and present a compact formula for the all-loop, all-genus, all-multiplicity amplitude integrand of a colored Yukawa theory. The curve integral formalism makes certain properties of the amplitudes manifest and repackages non-trivial numerators into a single combinatorial object. We also present an efficient formula for L-loop integrated amplitudes in terms of a sum over 2 ^L combinatorial determinants.

Recently in arXiv:2012.05599 Rudenko presented a formula for the volume of hyperbolic orthoschemes in terms of alternating polylogarithms. We use this result to provide an explicit analytic result for the one-loop scalar n-gon Feynman integral in n dimensions, for even n, with massless or massive internal and external edges. Furthermore, we evaluate the general six-dimensional hexagon integral in terms of classical polylogarithms.