English

Tropical fans, scattering equations and amplitudes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-11-24 v1

Abstract

We describe a family of tropical fans related to Grassmannian cluster algebras. These fans are related to the kinematic space of massless scattering processes in a number of ways. For each fan associated to the Grassmannian Gr(k,n){\rm Gr}(k,n) there is a notion of a generalised ϕ3\phi^3 amplitude and an associated set of scattering equations which further generalise the Gr(k,n){\rm Gr}(k,n) scattering equations that have been recently introduced. Here we focus mostly on the cases related to finite Grassmannian cluster algebras and we explain how face variables for the cluster polytopes are simply related to the scattering equations. For the Grassmannians Gr(4,n){\rm Gr}(4,n) the tropical fans we describe are related to the singularities (or symbol letters) of loop amplitudes in planar N=4\mathcal{N}=4 super Yang-Mills theory. We show how each choice of tropical fan leads to a natural class of polylogarithms, generalising the notion of cluster adjacency and we describe how the currently known loop data fit into this classification.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.04624,
  title  = {Tropical fans, scattering equations and amplitudes},
  author = {James Drummond and Jack Foster and Ömer Gürdoğan and Chrysostomos Kalousios},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.04624},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

31 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:38:46.979Z