Feynman amplitudes on moduli spaces of graphs

Abstract

This article introduces moduli spaces of coloured graphs on which Feynman amplitudes can be viewed as “discrete” volume densities. The basic idea behind this construction is that these moduli spaces decompose into disjoint unions of open cells on which parametric Feynman integrals are defined in a naturalway. Renormalisation of an amplitude translates then into the task of assigning to every cell a finite volume such that boundary relations between neighboring cells are respected. It is shown that this can be organized systematically using a type of Borel–Serre compactification of these moduli spaces. The key point is that in each compactified cell the newly added boundary components have a combinatorial description that resembles the forest structure of subdivergences of the corresponding Feynman diagram.