I’ve got another paper up this week with Jacob Bourjaily, Andrew McLeod, and Matthias Wilhelm, about integrating Feynman diagrams.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might be surprised: most of my work avoids Feynman diagrams at all costs. I’ve changed my mind, in part, because it turns out integrating Feynman diagrams can be a lot easier than I had thought.

At first, I thought Feynman integrals would be hard purely because they’re integrals. Those of you who’ve taken calculus might remember that, while taking derivatives was just a matter of following the rules, doing integrals required a lot more thought. Rather than one set of instructions, you had a set of tricks, meant to try to match your integral to the derivative of some known function. Sometimes the tricks worked, sometimes you just ended up completely lost.

As it turns out, that’s not quite the problem here. When I integrate a Feynman diagram, most of the time I’m expecting a particular kind of result, called a polylogarithm. If you know that’s the end goal, then you really can just follow the rules, using partial-fractioning to break your integral up into simpler integrations, linear pieces that you can match to the definition of polylogarithms. There are even programs that do this for you: Erik Panzer’s HyperInt is an especially convenient one.

Or it would be convenient, if Maple’s GUI wasn’t cursed…

Still, I wouldn’t have expected Feynman integrals to work particularly well, because they require too many integrations. You need to integrate a certain number of times to define a polylogarithm: for the ones we get out of Feynman diagrams, it’s two integrations for each loop the diagram has. The usual ways we calculate Feynman diagrams lead to a lot more integrations: the systematic method, using something called Symanzik polynomials, involves one integration per particle line in the diagram, which usually adds up to a lot more than two per loop.

When I arrived at the Niels Bohr Institute, I assumed everyone in my field knew about Symanzik polynomials. I was surprised when it turned out Jake Bourjaily hadn’t even heard of them. He was integrating Feynman diagrams by what seemed like a plodding, unsystematic method, taking the intro example from textbooks and just applying it over and over, gaining no benefit from all of the beautiful graph theory that goes into the Symanzik polynomials.

I was even more surprised when his method turned out to be the better one.

Avoid Symanzik polynomials, and you can manage with a lot fewer integrations. Suddenly we were pretty close to the “two integrations per loop” sweet spot, with only one or two “extra” integrations to do.

A few more advantages, and Feynman integrals were actually looking reasonable. The final insight came when we realized that just writing the problem in the right variables made a huge difference.

HyperInt, as I mentioned, tries to break a problem up into simpler integrals. Specifically, it’s trying to make things linear in the integration variable. In order to do this, sometimes it has to factor quadratic polynomials, like so:

Notice the square roots in this formula? Those can make your life a good deal trickier. Once you’ve got irrational functions in the game, HyperInt needs extra instructions for how to handle them, and integration is a lot more cumbersome.

The last insight, then, and the key point in our paper, is to avoid irrational functions. To do that, we use variables that rationalize the square roots.

We get these variables from one of the mainstays of our field, called momentum twistors. These variables are most useful in our favorite theory of N=4 super Yang-Mills, but they’re useful in other contexts too. By parametrizing them with a good “chart”, one with only the minimum number of variables we need to capture the integral, we can rationalize most of the square roots we encounter.

That “most” is going to surprise some people. We rationalized all of the expected square roots, letting us do integrals all the way to four loops in a few cases. But there were some unexpected square roots, and those we couldn’t rationalize.

These unexpected square roots don’t just make our life more complicated, if they stick around in a physically meaningful calculation they’ll upset a few other conjectures as well. People had expected that these integrals were made of certain kinds of “letters”, organized by a mathematical structure called a cluster algebra. That cluster algebra structure doesn’t have room for square roots, which suggests that it can’t be the full story here.

The integrals that we can do, though, with no surprise square roots? They’re much easier than anyone expected, much easier than with any other method. Rather than running around doing something fancy, we just integrated things the simple, rational way…and it worked!