English

Stokes Polytopes : The positive geometry for $\phi^{4}$ interactions

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-09-04 v3

Abstract

In a remarkable recent work [arXiv : 1711.09102] by Arkani-Hamed et al, the amplituhedron program was extended to the realm of non-supersymmetric scattering amplitudes. In particular it was shown that for tree-level planar diagrams in massless ϕ3\phi^{3} theory (and its close cousin, bi-adjoint ϕ3\phi^{3} theory) a polytope known as the associahedron sits inside the kinematic space and is the amplituhedron for the theory. Precisely as in the case of amplituhedron, it was shown that scattering amplitude is nothing but residue of the canonical form associated to the associahedron. Combinatorial and geometric properties of associahedron naturally encode properties like locality and unitarity of (tree level) scattering amplitudes. In this paper we attempt to extend this program to planar amplitudes in massless ϕ4\phi^{4} theory. We show that tree-level planar amplitudes in this theory can be obtained from geometry of objects known as the Stokes polytope which sits naturally inside the kinematic space. As in the case of associahedron we show that residues of the canonical form on these Stokes polytopes can be used to compute scattering amplitudes for quartic interactions. However unlike associahedron, Stokes polytope of a given dimension is not unique and as we show, one must sum over all of them to obtain the complete scattering amplitude. Not all Stokes polytopes contribute equally and we argue that the corresponding weights depend on purely combinatorial properties of the Stokes polytopes. As in the case of ϕ3\phi^{3} theory, we show how factorization of Stokes polytope implies unitarity and locality of the amplitudes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.05904,
  title  = {Stokes Polytopes : The positive geometry for $\phi^{4}$ interactions},
  author = {Pinaki Banerjee and Alok Laddha and Prashanth Raman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.05904},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

typos corrected, improvement in explanation of Stokes polytopes (combinatorial vs. convex realisation) and the Q-compatibility rule; accepted for publication in JHEP

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:15:34.820Z