I’ve got a new paper up, about the weird geometrical spaces we keep finding in Feynman diagrams.

With Jacob Bourjaily, Andrew McLeod, and Matthias Wilhelm, and most recently Cristian Vergu and Matthias Volk, I’ve been digging up odd mathematics in particle physics calculations. In several calculations, we’ve found that we need a type of space called a Calabi-Yau manifold. These spaces are often studied by string theorists, who hope they represent how “extra” dimensions of space are curled up. String theorists have found an absurdly large number of Calabi-Yau manifolds, so many that some are trying to sift through them with machine learning. We wanted to know if our situation was quite that ridiculous: how many Calabi-Yaus do we really need?

So we started asking around, trying to figure out how to classify our catch of Calabi-Yaus. And mostly, we just got confused.

It turns out there are a lot of different tools out there for understanding Calabi-Yaus, and most of them aren’t all that useful for what we’re doing. We went in circles for a while trying to understand how to desingularize toric varieties, and other things that will sound like gibberish to most of you. In the end, though, we noticed one small thing that made our lives a whole lot simpler.

It turns out that all of the Calabi-Yaus we’ve found are, in some sense, the same. While the details of the physics varies, the overall “space” is the same in each case. It’s a space we kept finding for our “Calabi-Yau bestiary”, but it turns out one of the “traintrack” diagrams we found earlier can be written in the same way. We found another example too, a “wheel” that seems to be the same type of Calabi-Yau.

We also found many examples that we don’t understand. Add another rung to our “traintrack” and we suddenly can’t write it in the same space. (Personally, I’m quite confused about this one.) Add another spoke to our wheel and we confuse ourselves in a different way.

So while our calculation turned out simpler than expected, we don’t think this is the full story. Our Calabi-Yaus might live in “the same space”, but there are also physics-related differences between them, and these we still don’t understand.

At some point, our abstract included the phrase “this paper raises more questions than it answers”. It doesn’t say that now, but it’s still true. We wrote this paper because, after getting very confused, we ended up able to say a few new things that hadn’t been said before. But the questions we raise are if anything more important. We want to inspire new interest in this field, toss out new examples, and get people thinking harder about the geometry of Feynman integrals.