Paper detail

Towards Positive Geometries of Massive Scalar field theories

Building on the prior work in [1] we locate a family of positive geometries in the kinematic space which are a specific class of convex realisations of the associahedron. These realisations are obtained by scaling and translating the kinematic space associahedron discovered by by Arkani-Hamed, Bai, He and Yan (ABHY). We call the resulting polytopes, deformed realisations of the associahedron. The deformed realisations shed new light on the CHY formula. One of the striking discoveries in [2] was the fact that the CHY scattering equations generate diffeomorphism between the (compactified) CHY moduli space and the ABHY associahedron. As we argue, the deformed realisation of the associahedron can also be interpreted as an diffeomorphic image of the CHY moduli space under scattering equations that we call deformed scattering equations. The canonical form in the kinematic space is thus once again the push-forward of the Parke-Taylor form . A natural off-shoot of our analysis is the universality of the Parke-Taylor form as a CHY Integrand for a class of (tree-level and planar) multi-scalar field amplitudes. These ideas help us in proving the existence of positive geometries for certain specific multi-scalar interactions. We prove that in a field theory with a massless and a massive bi-adjoint scalar fields which interact via cubic interaction, the tree-level S-matrix with massless external states and at most one massive propagator is a weighted sum over the canonical forms defined by certain deformed realisations of the associahedron. Finally, we show that these ideas admit an extension to one-loop. In particular, the one loop S-matrix integrand with at most one massive propagator is a weighted sum over canonical forms of a family of deformed realisations of the type-D cluster polytope, discovered in [3,4].