Related papers: The combinatorial geometry of particle physics
The many intricate connections between scattering amplitudes, on-shell diagrams, and the positroid stratification of the Grassmannian has recently been described in great detail. In order to facilitate the exploration of this rich…
We initiate the study of a class of polytopes, which we coin polypositroids, defined to be those polytopes that are simultaneously generalized permutohedra (or polymatroids) and alcoved polytopes. Whereas positroids are the matroids arising…
We extract the long-range gravitational potential between two scalar particles with arbitrary masses from the two-to-two elastic scattering amplitude at 2nd Post-Minkowskian order in arbitrary dimensions. In contrast to the four-dimensional…
It has been a long-standing challenge to find a geometric object underlying the cosmological wavefunction for Tr($\phi^3$) theory, generalizing associahedra and surfacehedra for scattering amplitudes. In this note we describe a new class of…
The all-loop integrand for scattering amplitudes in planar N = 4 SYM is determined by an "amplitude form" with logarithmic singularities on the boundary of the amplituhedron. In this note we provide strong evidence for a new striking…
The complete tree-level S-matrix of four dimensional ${\cal N}=4$ super Yang-Mills and ${\cal N} = 8$ supergravity has compact forms as integrals over the moduli space of certain rational maps. In this note we derive formulas for amplitudes…
We employ scattering amplitudes in curved space to model the dynamics of a light probe particle with mass $m$ orbiting in the background spacetime induced by a heavy gravitational source with mass $M$. Observables are organized as an…
A gaussoid is a combinatorial structure that encodes independence in probability and statistics, just like matroids encode independence in linear algebra. The gaussoid axioms of Lnenicka and Mat\'us are equivalent to compatibility with…
A new approach is developed within the first-order Born approximation to light scattering from a collection of particles with $\mathcal{L}$ types. Two $\mathcal{L}\times\mathcal{L}$ matrices called pair-potential matrix (PPM) and…
Positroids are certain representable matroids originally studied by Postnikov in connection with the totally nonnegative Grassmannian and now used widely in algebraic combinatorics. The positroids give rise to determinantal equations…
Gamma-positivity is an elementary property that polynomials with symmetric coefficients may have, which directly implies their unimodality. The idea behind it stems from work of Foata, Sch\"utzenberger and Strehl on the Eulerian…
Graviton and gluon scattering are studied from minimal physical assumptions such as Poincare and gauge symmetry as well as unitarity. The assumptions lead to an interesting and surprisingly restrictive set of linear equations. This shows…
In this paper we study a relation between two positive geometries: the momentum amplituhedron, relevant for tree-level scattering amplitudes in $\mathcal{N} = 4$ super Yang-Mills theory, and the kinematic associahedron, encoding tree-level…
Polymatroids are combinatorial abstractions of subspace arrangements in the same way that matroids are combinatorial abstractions of hyperplane arrangements. By introducing augmented Chow rings of polymatroids, modeled after augmented…
You might've heard about various mathematical properties of scattering amplitudes such as analyticity, sheets, branch cuts, discontinuities, etc. What does it all mean? In these lectures, we'll take a guided tour through simple scattering…
Matroid varieties are the closures in the Grassmannian of sets of points defined by specifying which Pl\"ucker coordinates vanish and which don't --- the set of nonvanishing Pl\"ucker coordinates forms a well-studied object called a…
This thesis is basically devoted to matroids -- fundamental structure of combinatorial optimization -- though some of our results concern simplicial complexes, or Euclidean spaces. We study old and new problems for these structures, with…
Scattering amplitudes have their origin in quantum field theory, but have wide-ranging applications extending to classical physics. We review a formalism to connect certain classical observables to scattering amplitudes. An advantage of…
A phenomenology for the deep spatial geometry of loop quantum gravity is introduced. In the context of a simple model, an atom of space, it is shown how purely combinatorial structures can affect observations. The angle operator is used to…
We present a study of cubic surfaces from the novel perspective of positive geometry. Our positive geometries have dimension two (the surface minus its 27 lines), dimension three (its complement in 3-space), and dimension four (the moduli…