No Arabic abstract
Modular graph forms are a class of modular covariant functions which appear in the genus-one contribution to the low-energy expansion of closed string scattering amplitudes. Modular graph forms with holomorphic subgraphs enjoy the simplifying property that they may be reduced to sums of products of modular graph forms of strictly lower loop order. In the particular case of dihedral modular graph forms, a closed form expression for this holomorphic subgraph reduction was obtained previously by DHoker and Green. In the current work, we extend these results to trihedral modular graph forms. Doing so involves the identification of a modular covariant regularization scheme for certain conditionally convergent sums over discrete momenta, with some elements of the sum being excluded. The appropriate regularization scheme is identified for any number of exclusions, which in principle allows one to perform holomorphic subgraph reduction of higher-point modular graph forms with arbitrary holomorphic subgraphs.
This paper investigates the relations between modular graph forms, which are generalizations of the modular graph functions that were introduced in earlier papers motivated by the structure of the low energy expansion of genus-one Type II superstring amplitudes. These modular graph forms are multiple sums associated with decorated Feynman graphs on the world-sheet torus. The action of standard differential operators on these modular graph forms admits an algebraic representation on the decorations. First order differential operators are used to map general non-holomorphic modular graph functions to holomorphic modular forms. This map is used to provide proofs of the identities between modular graph functions for weight less than six conjectured in earlier work, by mapping these identities to relations between holomorphic modular forms which are proven by holomorphic methods. The map is further used to exhibit the structure of identities at arbitrary weight.
Higher genus modular graph tensors map Feynman graphs to functions on the Torelli space of genus-$h$ compact Riemann surfaces which transform as tensors under the modular group $Sp(2h , mathbb Z)$, thereby generalizing a construction of Kawazumi. An infinite family of algebraic identities between one-loop and tree-level modular graph tensors are proven for arbitrary genus and arbitrary tensorial rank. We also derive a family of identities that apply to modular graph tensors of higher loop order.
Elliptic modular graph functions and forms (eMGFs) are defined for arbitrary graphs as natural generalizations of modular graph functions and forms obtained by including the character of an Abelian group in their Kronecker--Eisenstein series. The simplest examples of eMGFs are given by the Green function for a massless scalar field on the torus and the Zagier single-valued elliptic polylogarithms. More complicated eMGFs are produced by the non-separating degeneration of a higher genus surface to a genus one surface with punctures. eMGFs may equivalently be represented by multiple integrals over the torus of combinations of coefficients of the Kronecker--Eisenstein series, and may be assembled into generating series. These relations are exploited to derive holomorphic subgraph reduction formulas, as well as algebraic and differential identities between eMGFs and their generating series.
In this thesis, we investigate the low-energy expansion of scattering amplitudes of closed strings at one-loop level (i.e. at genus one) in a ten-dimensional Minkowski background using a special class of functions called modular graph forms. These allow for a systematic evaluation of the low-energy expansion and satisfy many non-trivial algebraic and differential relations. We study these relations in detail, leading to basis decompositions for a large number of modular graph forms which greatly reduce the complexity of the expansions of the integrals appearing in the amplitude. One of the results of this thesis is a Mathematica package which automatizes these simplifications. We use these techniques to compute the leading low-energy orders of the scattering amplitude of four gluons in the heterotic string at one-loop level. Furthermore, we study a generating function which conjecturally contains the torus integrals of all perturbative closed-string theories. We write this generating function in terms of iterated integrals of holomorphic Eisenstein series and use this approach to arrive at a more rigorous characterization of the space of modular graph forms than was possible before. For tree-level string amplitudes, the single-valued map of multiple zeta values maps open-string amplitudes to closed-string amplitudes. The definition of a suitable one-loop generalization, a so-called elliptic single-valued map, is an active area of research and we provide a new perspective on this topic using our generating function of torus integrals. The original version of this thesis, as submitted in June 2020 to the Humboldt University Berlin, is available under the DOI 10.18452/21829. The present text contains minor updates compared to this version, reflecting further developments in the literature, in particular concerning the construction of an elliptic single-valued map.
We continue the analysis of modular invariant functions, subject to inhomogeneous Laplace eigenvalue equations, that were determined in terms of Poincare series in a companion paper. The source term of the Laplace equation is a product of (derivatives of) two non-holomorphic Eisenstein series whence the modular invariants are assigned depth two. These modular invariant functions can sometimes be expressed in terms of single-valued iterated integrals of holomorphic Eisenstein series as they appear in generating series of modular graph forms. We show that the set of iterated integrals of Eisenstein series has to be extended to include also iterated integrals of holomorphic cusp forms to find expressions for all modular invariant functions of depth two. The coefficients of these cusp forms are identified as ratios of their L-values inside and outside the critical strip.