English

Multi-Loop Negative Geometries

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-05-29 v1

Abstract

Scattering amplitudes in planar N=4{\cal N}=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory are dual to expectation values of null polygonal Wilson loops. The Amplituhedron provides a geometric construction for the all-loop integrand as the canonical form on the geometric region in the Grassmannian defined by a certain set of inequalities. For a closely related object, the logarithm of the scattering amplitude, the integrand is reproduced in a similar way using negative geometries. When integrated over all loop momenta except one, the result is infrared (IR) finite and equal to the expectation value of a certain Wilson loop with a Lagrangian insertion. At four points, this quantity, F(g,z){\cal F}(g,z) only depends on a single cross ratio zz and the 't Hooft coupling gg. At weak coupling, it is known up to three loops from perturbative Wilson loop computations and at strong coupling through the AdS/CFT correspondence at leading order. In this paper, we explore this object further through the lens of the Amplituhedron and negative geometries, which provide very natural IR finite building blocks. We perform an explicit three-loop computation of all negative geometries and show that the number of internal cycles in the diagram is closely linked to the depth of polylogarithms. We calculate the cusp anomalous dimension Γcusp\Gamma_{\rm cusp} by integrating F(g,z){\cal F}(g,z) over zz. We show that the higher-cycle diagrams are suppressed if we consider separate odd and even zeta contributions. Furthermore, we focus on certain convergent infinite series of one-cycle diagrams, perform all-loop order resummations of such contributions, and discuss various features of the result.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.28926,
  title  = {Multi-Loop Negative Geometries},
  author = {Lance J. Dixon and Umut Oktem and Shruti Paranjape and Jaroslav Trnka and Yongqun Xu and Shun-Qing Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.28926},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

75 pages, 80 figures, ancillary files provided