On-shell diagrams and the geometry of planar N<4 $$ \mathcal{N}<4 $$ SYM theories

Abstract We continue the discussion of the decorated on-shell diagrammatics for planar N<4 $$ \mathcal{N}<4 $$ Supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories started in [1]. In particular, we focus on its relation with the structure of varieties on the Grassmannian. The decoration of the on-shell diagrams...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Paolo Benincasa, David Gordo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2017-11-01
Series:Journal of High Energy Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP11(2017)192
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Summary:Abstract We continue the discussion of the decorated on-shell diagrammatics for planar N<4 $$ \mathcal{N}<4 $$ Supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories started in [1]. In particular, we focus on its relation with the structure of varieties on the Grassmannian. The decoration of the on-shell diagrams, which physically keeps tracks of the helicity of the coherent states propagating along their edges, defines new on-shell functions on the Grassmannian and can introduce novel higher-order singularities, which graphically are reflected into the presence of helicity loops in the diagrams. These new structures turn out to have similar features as in the non-planar case: the related higher-codimension varieties are identified by either the vanishing of one (or more) Plücker coordinates involving at least two non-adjacent columns, or new relations among Plücker coordinates. A distinctive feature is that the functions living on these higher-codimenson varieties can be thought of distributionally as having support on derivative delta-functions. After a general discussion, we explore in some detail the structures of the on-shell functions on Gr(2, 4) and Gr(3, 6) on which the residue theorem allows to obtain a plethora of identities among them.
ISSN:1029-8479