Unification of Residues and Grassmannian Dualities
Dec, 2009
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Abstract: (arXiv)
The conjectured duality relating all-loop leading singularities of n-particle N^(k-2)MHV scattering amplitudes in N=4 SYM to a simple contour integral over the Grassmannian G(k,n) makes all the symmetries of the theory manifest. Every residue is individually Yangian invariant, but does not have a local space-time interpretation--only a special sum over residues gives physical amplitudes. In this paper we show that the sum over residues giving tree amplitudes can be unified into a single algebraic variety, which we explicitly construct for all NMHV and N^2MHV amplitudes. Remarkably, this allows the contour integral to have a 'particle interpretation' in the Grassmannian, where higher-point amplitudes can be constructed from lower-point ones by adding one particle at a time, with soft limits manifest. We move on to show that the connected prescription for tree amplitudes in Witten's twistor string theory also admits a Grassmannian particle interpretation, where the integral over the Grassmannian localizes over the Veronese map from G(2,n) to G(k,n). These apparently very different theories are related by a natural deformation with a parameter t that smoothly interpolates between them. For NMHV amplitudes, we use a simple residue theorem to prove t-independence of the result, thus establishing a novel kind of duality between these theories.Note:
- 56 pages, 11 figures/ v2: typos corrected, minor improvements
- Supersymmetry and Duality
- Supersymmetric gauge theory
- Extended Supersymmetry
- String Duality
- string model: twistor
- scattering amplitude
- gauge field theory: Yang-Mills
- duality: Grassmann
- tree approximation
- singularity
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