BCFW tilings and cluster adjacency for the amplituhedron

Chaim Even-Zohar, Tsviqa Lakrec, Matteo Parisi, Melissa Sherman-Bennett, Ran Tessler, Lauren Williams

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In 2005, Britto, Cachazo, Feng, and Witten gave a recurrence (now known as the BCFW recurrence) for computing scattering amplitudes in N = 4 super Yang–Mills theory. Arkani-Hamed and Trnka subsequently introduced the amplituhedron to give a geometric interpretation of the BCFW recurrence. Arkani-Hamed and Trnka conjectured that each way of iterating the BCFW recurrence gives a “triangulation” or “tiling” of the m=4 amplituhedron. In this article, we prove the BCFW tiling conjecture of Arkani-Hamed and Trnka. We also prove the cluster adjacency conjecture for BCFW tiles of the amplituhedron, which says that facets of tiles are cut out by collections of compatible cluster variables for the Grassmannian Gr4,n. Moreover we show that each BCFW tile is the subset of the Grassmannian where certain cluster variables have particular signs.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere2408572122
JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume122
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - 25 Mar 2025

Keywords

  • amplituhedron
  • cluster algebras
  • N = 4 super Yang–Mills
  • positive Grassmannian
  • scattering amplitudes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General

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