Talk
Scattering amplitudes of stable curves
- Jenia Tevlev (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Abstract
Equations of hypertree divisors on the Grothendieck-Knudsen moduli space of stable rational curves, introduced by Castravet and Tevelev, appear as numerators of scattering amplitude forms for n massless particles in N=4 Yang-Mills theory in the work of Arkani-Hamed, Bourjaily, Cachazo, Postnikov and Trnka. We re-interpret and generalize leading singularities of MHV scattering amplitude forms as probabilistic Brill-Noether theory: the study of statistics of images of n marked points on a Riemann surface under a random meromorphic function. This leads to a beautiful physics-inspired geometry for various classes of algebraic curves: smooth, stable, hyperelliptic, real algebraic, etc.