English

Stringy canonical forms and binary geometries from associahedra, cyclohedra and generalized permutohedra

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-12-01 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

Stringy canonical forms are a class of integrals that provide α\alpha'-deformations of the canonical form of any polytopes. For generalized associahedra of finite-type cluster algebra, there exist completely rigid stringy integrals, whose configuration spaces are the so-called binary geometries, and for classical types are associated with (generalized) scattering of particles and strings. In this paper we propose a large class of rigid stringy canonical forms for another class of polytopes, generalized permutohedra, which also include associahedra and cyclohedra as special cases (type AnA_n and BnB_n generalized associahedra). Remarkably, we find that the configuration spaces of such integrals are also binary geometries, which were suspected to exist for generalized associahedra only. For any generalized permutohedron that can be written as Minkowski sum of coordinate simplices, we show that its rigid stringy integral factorizes into products of lower integrals for massless poles at finite α\alpha', and the configuration space is binary although the uu equations take a more general form than those "perfect" ones for cluster cases. Moreover, we provide an infinite class of examples obtained by degenerations of type AnA_n and BnB_n integrals, which have perfect uu equations as well. Our results provide yet another family of generalizations of the usual string integral and moduli space, whose physical interpretations remain to be explored.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.07395,
  title  = {Stringy canonical forms and binary geometries from associahedra, cyclohedra and generalized permutohedra},
  author = {Song He and Zhenjie Li and Prashanth Raman and Chi Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.07395},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

39 pages, 8 figures; v2: journal version, added affiliations