English

A Soft Theorem for the Tropical Grassmannian

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-09-13 v1

Abstract

We study the soft limit of a recently proposed generalization of the biadjoint scalar amplitudes mn(k)m^{(k)}_{n}, which have been conjectured to have a relation to the tropical Grassmannian Tr G(k,n)\text{Tr G}(k,n). Using the CHY formulation along with the Global Residue Theorem, we prove the soft factorization for mn(k)m^{(k)}_{n} amplitudes for arbitrary kk and nn. We find that the soft factors are in direct correspondence to vertices of the associahedron Ak1\mathcal{A}_{k-1}, and hence take the form of mn(2)m^{(2)}_{n} amplitudes. This entails that all scattering amplitudes of the ordinary biadjoint scalar theory can be interpreted as an infinite family of soft factors. Additionally, Grassmannian duality reveals that generalized amplitudes mn(k)m^{(k)}_{n} with k>2k>2 satisfy not only a soft theorem, but also a non-trivial "hard" theorem. We perform numerical checks of our theorems against previous results for Tr G(4,7)\text{Tr G}(4,7) and Tr G(5,8)\text{Tr G}(5,8), thereby providing strong evidence of their relation with the CHY formulation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.05291,
  title  = {A Soft Theorem for the Tropical Grassmannian},
  author = {Diego García Sepúlveda and Alfredo Guevara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.05291},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

28 + 9 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:12:44.936Z