Amplitudes at Weak Coupling as Polytopes in AdS_5
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.
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