English

Flow-oriented perturbation theory

High Energy Physics - Theory 2023-02-02 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We introduce a new diagrammatic approach to perturbative quantum field theory, which we call flow-oriented perturbation theory (FOPT). Within it, Feynman graphs are replaced by strongly connected directed graphs (digraphs). FOPT is a coordinate space analogue of time-ordered perturbation theory and loop-tree duality, but it has the advantage of having combinatorial and canonical Feynman rules, combined with a simplified iεi\varepsilon dependence of the resulting integrals. Moreover, we introduce a novel digraph-based representation for the S-matrix. The associated integrals involve the Fourier transform of the flow polytope. Due to this polytope's properties, our S-matrix representation exhibits manifest infrared singularity factorization on a per-diagram level. Our findings reveal an interesting interplay between spurious singularities and Fourier transforms of polytopes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.05532,
  title  = {Flow-oriented perturbation theory},
  author = {Michael Borinsky and Zeno Capatti and Eric Laenen and Alexandre Salas-Bernárdez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.05532},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

54 pages, many figures; v2: typos corrected and discussion on renormalization added - version to appear in JHEP

R2 v1 2026-06-28T03:15:33.503Z