Generalized permutohedra in the kinematic space

Abstract

In this note, we study the permutohedral geometry of the poles of a certain differential form introduced in recent work of Arkani-Hamed, Bai, He and Yan. There it was observed that the poles of the form determine a family of polyhedra which have the same face lattice as that of the permutohedron. We realize that family explicitly, proving that it in fact fills out the configuration space of a particularly well-behaved family of generalized permutohedra, the zonotopal generalized permutohedra, that are obtained as the Minkowski sums of line segments parallel to the root directions $e_i-e_j$. Finally we interpret Mizera's formula for the biadjoint scalar amplitude $m({\mathbb{I}}_n,{\mathbb{I}}_n)$, restricted to a certain dimension $n-2$ subspace of the kinematic space, as a sum over the boundary components of the standard root cone, which is the conical hull of the roots $e_1-e_2,\dots ,e_{n-2}-e_{n-1}$.

23 pages, 7 figures