Monday, February 23, 2015

What about non-planar Feynman diagrams in twistor approach

Non-planar Feynman diagrams have remained a challenge for the twistor approach. The problem is simple: there is
no canonical ordering of the extrenal particles and the loop integrand involving tricky shifts in integrations to get finite outcome is not unique and well-defined so that twistor Grasmann approach encounters difficulties.

Recently Nima Arkani-Hamed et al have have also considered non-planar MHV diagrams (having minimal number of "wrong" helicities) of N=4 SUSY, and shown that they can be reduced to non-planar diagrams for different permutations of vertices of planar diagrams ordered naturally. There are several integration regions identified as positive Grassmannians corresponding to different orderings of the external lines inducing non-planarity. This does not however hold true generally.

At the QFT limit the crossings of lines emerges purely combinatorially since Feynman diagrams are purely combinatorial objects with the ordering of vertices determining the topological properties of the diagram. Non-planar diagrams correspond to diagrams, which do not allow crossing-free imbedding to plane but require higher genus surface to get rid of crossings.

  1. The number of the vertices of the diagram and identification of lines connecting them determines the diagram as a graph. This defines also in TGD framework Feynman diagram like structure as a graph for the fermion lines and should be behind non-planarity in QFT sense.

  2. Could 2-D Feynman graphs exists also at geometric rather than only combinatorial level? Octonionization at imbedding space level requires identification of preferred M2⊂ M4 defining a preferred hyper-complex sub-space. Could the projection of the Fermion lines defined concrete geometric representation of Feynman diagrams?

  3. Despite their purely combinatorial character Feynman diagrams are analogous to knots and braids. For years ago I proposed the generalization of the construction of knot invariants in which one gradually eliminates the crossings of the knot projection to end up with a trivial knot is highly suggestive as a procedure for constructing the amplitudes associated with the non-planar diagrams. The outcome should be a collection of planar diagrams calculable using twistor Grassmannian methods. Scattering amplitudes could be seen as analogs of knot invariants. The reduction of MHV diagrams to planar diagrams could be an example of this procedure.

One can imagine also analogs of non-planarity, which are geometric and topological rather than combinatorial and not visible at the QFT limit of TGD.
  1. The fermion lines representing boundaries of string world sheets at the light-like orbits of partonic 2-surfaces can get braided. The same can happen also for the string boundaries at space-like 3-surfaces at the ends of the space-time surface. The projections of these braids to partonic 2-surfaces are analogs of non-planar diagrams. If the fermion lines at single wormhole throat are regarded effectively as a line representing one member of super-multiplet, this kind of braiding remains below the resolution used and cannot correspond to the braiding at QFT limit.

  2. 2-knotting and 2-braiding are possible for partonic 2-surfaces and string world sheets as 2-surfaces in 4-D space-time surfaces and have no counterpart at QFT limit.

  3. If one can approximate space-time sheets by maps from M4 to CP2, one expects General Relativity and QFT description to be good approximations. GRT space-time is obtained by replacing space-time sheets with single sheet - a piece of slightly deformed Minkowski space but without assupmtion about imbedding to H. Induced classical gravitational field and gauge fields are sums of those associated with the sheets. The generalized Feynman diagrams with lines at various sheets and going also between sheets are projected to single piece of M4. Many-sheetedness makes 1-homology non-trivial and implies analog of braiding, which should be however invisible at QFT limit.

See the chapter Classical part of the twistor story or the article Classical part of the twistor story.

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