English

Exterior Cyclic Polytopes and Convexity of Amplituhedra

Combinatorics 2025-07-25 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

The amplituhedron is a semialgebraic set in the Grassmannian. We study convexity and duality of amplituhedra. We introduce a notion of convexity, called \textit{extendable convexity}, for real semialgebraic sets in any embedded projective variety. We show that the k=m=2k=m=2 amplituhedron is extendably convex in the Grassmannian of lines in projective three-space. In the process we introduce a new polytope called the \emph{exterior cyclic polytope}, generalizing the cyclic polytope. It is equal to the convex hull of the amplituhedron in the Pl\"ucker embedding. We undertake a combinatorial analysis of the exterior cyclic polytope, its facets, and its dual. Finally, we introduce the \textit{(extendable) dual amplituhedron}, which is closely related to the dual of the exterior cyclic polytope. We show that the dual amplituhedron for k=m=2k=m=2 is again an amplituhedron, where the external matrix data is changed by the twist map.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.17620,
  title  = {Exterior Cyclic Polytopes and Convexity of Amplituhedra},
  author = {Elia Mazzucchelli and Elizabeth Pratt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.17620},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

30 pages, 10 figures, 1 table; comments welcome