Constraining the weights of Stokes polytopes using BCFW recursions for ϕ4

Abstract

Abstract The relationship between certain geometric objects called polytopes and scattering amplitudes has revealed deep structures in QFTs. It has been developed in great depth at the tree- and loop-level amplitudes in $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 4 SYM theory and has been extended to the scalar ϕ3 and ϕ4 theories at tree-level. In this paper, we use the generalized BCFW recursion relations for massless planar ϕ4 theory to constrain the weights of a class of geometric objects called Stokes polytopes, which manifest in the geometric formulation of ϕ4 amplitudes. We see that the weights of the Stokes polytopes are intricately tied to the boundary terms in ϕ4 theories. We compute the weights of N = 1, 2, and 3 dimensional Stokes polytopes corresponding to six-, eight- and ten-point amplitudes respectively. We generalize our results to higher-point amplitudes and show that the generalized BCFW recursions uniquely fix the weights for an n-point amplitude.