No Arabic abstract
It has recently been demonstrated that Feynman integrals relevant to a wide range of perturbative quantum field theories involve periods of Calabi-Yaus of arbitrarily large dimension. While the number of Calabi-Yau manifolds of dimension three or higher is considerable (if not infinite), those relevant to most known examples come from a very simple class: degree-$2k$ hypersurfaces in $k$-dimensional weighted projective space $mathbb{WP}^{1,ldots,1,k}$. In this work, we describe some of the basic properties of these spaces and identify additional examples of Feynman integrals that give rise to hypersurfaces of this type. Details of these examples at three and four loops are included as ancillary files to this work.
We define the rigidity of a Feynman integral to be the smallest dimension over which it is non-polylogarithmic. We argue that massless Feynman integrals in four dimensions have a rigidity bounded by 2(L-1) at L loops, and we show that this bound may be saturated for integrals that we call marginal: those with (L+1)D/2 propagators in (even) D dimensions. We show that marginal Feynman integrals in D dimensions generically involve Calabi-Yau geometries, and we give examples of finite four-dimensional Feynman integrals in massless $phi^4$ theory that saturate our predicted bound in rigidity at all loop orders.
We provide a comprehensive summary of concepts from Calabi-Yau motives relevant to the computation of multi-loop Feynman integrals. From this we derive several consequences for multi-loop integrals in general, and we illustrate them on the example of multi-loop banana integrals. For example, we show how Griffiths transversality, known from the theory of variation of mixed Hodge structures, leads quite generically to a set of quadratic relations among maximal cut integrals associated to Calabi-Yau motives. These quadratic relations then naturally lead to a compact expression for $l$-loop banana integrals in $D=2$ dimensions in terms of an integral over a period of a Calabi-Yau $(l-1)$-fold. This new integral representation generalizes in a natural way the known representations for $lle 3$ involving logarithms with square root arguments and iterated integrals of Eisenstein series. In a second part, we show how the results obtained by some of the authors in earlier work can be extended to dimensional regularization. We present a method to obtain the differential equations for banana integrals with an arbitrary number of loops in dimensional regularization without the need to solve integration-by-parts relations. We also present a compact formula for the leading asymptotics of banana integrals with an arbitrary number of loops in the large momentum limit. This generalizes the novel $widehat{Gamma}$-class introduced by some of the authors to dimensional regularization and provides a convenient boundary condition to solve the differential equations for the banana integrals. As an application, we present for the first time numerical results for equal-mass banana integrals with up to four loops and up to second order in the dimensional regulator.
We show how the smooth geometry of Calabi-Yau manifolds emerges from the thermodynamic limit of the statistical mechanical model of crystal melting defined in our previous paper arXiv:0811.2801. In particular, the thermodynamic partition function of molten crystals is shown to be equal to the classical limit of the partition function of the topological string theory by relating the Ronkin function of the characteristic polynomial of the crystal melting model to the holomorphic 3-form on the corresponding Calabi-Yau manifold.
We prove that a Kahler supermetric on a supermanifold with one complex fermionic dimension admits a super Ricci-flat supermetric if and only if the bosonic metric has vanishing scalar curvature. As a corollary, it follows that Yaus theorem does not hold for supermanifolds.
We study when Calabi-Yau supermanifolds M(1|2) with one complex bosonic coordinate and two complex fermionic coordinates are super Ricci-flat, and find that if the bosonic manifold is compact, it must have constant scalar curvature.