Member Seminar

Speaker: Matteo Parisi

Title: Amplituhedra, Scattering Amplitudes and Triangulations

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss about Amplituhedra – generalizations of polytopes inside the Grassmannian – recently introduced by physicists as new geometric constructions encoding interactions of elementary particles in certain Quantum Field Theories. In particular, I will explain how the problem of finding triangulations of Amplituhedra is connected to computing scattering amplitudes of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. Triangulations of polygons are encoded in the associahedron studied by Stasheff in the sixties; in the case of polytopes, triangulations are captured by secondary polytopes constructed by Gelfand et al. in the nineties. Whereas a “secondary” geometry describing triangulations of Amplituhedra is still not known, and we pave the way for such studies. We will discuss how the combinatorics of triangulations interplays with T-duality from String Theory, in connection with a dual object we define – the Momentum Amplituhedron. A generalization of T-duality led us to discover a striking duality between triangulations of Amplituhedra of “m=2” type and the ones of a seemingly unrelated object – the Hypersimplex. The latter is a polytope which has been central in many contexts, such as matroid theory, torus orbits in the Grassmannian, and tropical geometry. Based on joint works with Lauren Williams, Melissa Sherman-Bennett, Tomasz Lukowski [arXiv:2104.08254, arXiv:2002.06164].