English

Amplitudes at Weak Coupling as Polytopes in AdS_5

High Energy Physics - Theory 2011-03-18 v1 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We show that one-loop scalar box functions can be interpreted as volumes of geodesic tetrahedra embedded in a copy of AdS_5 that has dual conformal space-time as boundary. When the tetrahedron is space-like, it lies in a totally geodesic hyperbolic three-space inside AdS_5, with its four vertices on the boundary. It is a classical result that the volume of such a tetrahedron is given by the Bloch-Wigner dilogarithm and this agrees with the standard physics formulae for such box functions. The combinations of box functions that arise in the n-particle one-loop MHV amplitude in N=4 super Yang-Mills correspond to the volume of a three-dimensional polytope without boundary, all of whose vertices are attached to a null polygon (which in other formulations is interpreted as a Wilson loop) at infinity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1004.3498,
  title  = {Amplitudes at Weak Coupling as Polytopes in AdS_5},
  author = {Lionel Mason and David Skinner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1004.3498},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

16 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:12:41.857Z