Landau singularities and convex geometry

Abstract

We revisit the classic 1959 paper of L. D. Landau on possible singularities of the integral associated to a Feynman graph. Focusing on the real setup, we relate it to convex geometry by representing a collection $p$ of incoming momenta as the weighted normals of a convex polytope $Q$ via the Minkowski problem. Then, a regular polyhedral subdivision $\mathcal{P}$ of $Q$ exhibits $p$ as a Landau singularity labelled by the dual graph of $\mathcal{P}$ with masses being the areas of the faces. Positivity of the Landau/Feynman/Schwinger multipliers is interpreted as strict convexity of a PL-function. This gives an interesting class of ``polyhedral'' Landau singularities. In the planar case going back to the original 1959 paper, Landau graphs can also be identified with plane webs of Gaiotto-Moore-Witten that provide a language dual to that of regular polygonal subdivisions.

27 pages, 9 figures