Amplitubes: Graph Cosmohedra

TL;DR

This paper introduces graph cosmohedra, a new family of polytopes generalizing cosmohedra, to define cosmological wavefunctions for arbitrary graphs through a sum over their vertices, extending previous geometric amplitude constructions.

Contribution

It generalizes the concept of cosmohedra to arbitrary graphs, defining graph cosmohedra via boundary blow-ups of graph associahedra, and introduces cosmological tubes for wavefunction calculations.

Findings

Defined graph cosmohedra through boundary blow-ups.

Constructed explicit embeddings for the new polytopes.

Extended geometric wavefunction methods to arbitrary graphs.

Abstract

The tree-level scattering amplitudes for $\text{tr}(\phi^3)$ theory can be interpreted as a sum over the vertices of a polytope known as the associahedron. For each graph $G$, there exists a natural generalisation of the associahedron, which is constructed by considering tubes and tubings of the underling graph. This family of polytopes are called graph associahedra. The classical associahedra then arise as the graph associahedron for the path graphs. It is therefore natural to associate to each graph associahedron an amplitude-like object, we refer to as the amplitube, defined via a sum over its vertices. Recently, also in the context of trace $\text{tr}(\phi^3)$ theory, progress has been made towards defining a new geometric object, coined the cosmohedron, which computes not the amplitude, but the cosmological wavefunction as a sum over its vertices. This polytope can be constructed by consistently blowing up all boundaries of the associahedron to co-dimension one. Building on these results, in the present paper, we generalise the notion of the wavefunction for arbitrary graphs. These new expressions, which we call cosmological amplitubes, are defined via a sum over the vertices of a corresponding polytope, the graph cosmohedron. The graph cosmohedra are constructed by considering regions and regional tubings of the underlying graph which we introduce. Like the cosmohedron, the graph cosmohedra can be obtained by consistently blowing up all boundaries of the corresponding graph associahedron to co-dimension one. This new family of polytopes constitutes a vast generalisation of the cosmohedron, and we provide explicit embeddings for them, which builds upon an ABHY-like embedding for the graph associahedra.