Adjacency for scattering amplitudes from the Gröbner fan

Abstract: Scattering amplitudes in planar $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory exhibit singularities which reflect various aspects of the cluster algebras associated to the Grassmannians ${\rm Gr}(4,n)$ and their tropical counterparts. Here we investigate the potential origins of such structures and examine the extent to which they can be recovered from the Gr\"obner structure of the underlying Pl\"ucker ideals, focussing on the Grassmannians corresponding to finite cluster algebras. Starting from the Pl\"ucker ideal, we describe how the polynomial cluster variables are encoded in non-prime initial ideals associated to certain maximal cones of the positive tropical fan. Following [1] we show that extending the Pl\"ucker ideal by such variables leads to a Gr\"obner fan with a single maximal Gr\"obner cone spanned by the positive tropical rays. The associated initial ideal encodes the compatibility relations among the full set of cluster variables. Thus we find that the Gr\"obner structure naturally encodes both the symbol alphabet and the cluster adjacency relations exhibited by scattering amplitudes without invoking the cluster algebra at all. As a potential application of these ideas we then examine the kinematic ideal associated to non-dual conformal massless scattering written in terms of spinor helicity variables. For five-particle scattering we find that the ideal can be identified with the Pl\"ucker ideal for ${\rm Gr}(3,6)$ and the corresponding tropical fan contains a number of non-prime ideals which encode all additional letters of the two-loop pentagon function alphabet present in various calculations of massless five-point finite remainders.