Motivic Galois coaction and one-loop Feynman graphs

Following the work of Brown, we can canonically associate a family of motivic periods — called the motivic Feynman amplitude — to any convergent Feynman integral, viewed as a function of the kinematic variables. The motivic Galois theory of motivic Feynman amplitudes provides an organizing principle, as well as strong constraints, on the space of amplitudes in general, via Brown’s “small graphs principle”. This serves as motivation for explicitly computing the motivic Galois action, or, dually, the coaction of the Hopf algebra of functions on the motivic Galois group. In this paper, we study the motivic Galois coaction on the motivic Feynman amplitudes associated to one-loop Feynman graphs. We study the associated variations of mixed Hodge structures, and provide an explicit formula for the coaction on the four-edge cycle graph — the box graph — with non-vanishing generic kinematics, which leads to a formula for all one-loop graphs with non-vanishing generic kinematics in four-dimensional space-time. We also show how one computes the coaction in some degenerate configurations — when defining the motive of the graph requires blowing up the underlying family of varieties — on the example of the three-edge cycle graph.

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This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 724638).

Received 4 November 2019

Accepted 17 October 2020

Published 18 June 2021