Positroid stratification of orthogonal Grassmannian and ABJM amplitudes

Abstract

A novel understanding of scattering amplitudes in terms of on-shell diagrams and positive Grassmannian has been recently established for four dimensional Yang-Mills theories and three dimensional Chern-Simons theories of ABJM type. We give a detailed construction of the positroid stratification of orthogonal Grassmannian relevant for ABJM amplitudes. On-shell diagrams are classified by pairing of external particles. We introduce a combinatorial aid called `OG tableaux' and map each equivalence class of on-shell diagrams to a unique tableau. The on-shell diagrams related to each other through BCFW bridging are naturally grouped by the OG tableaux. Introducing suitably ordered BCFW bridges and positive coordinates, we construct the complete coordinate charts to cover the entire positive orthogonal Grassmannian for arbitrary number of external particles. The graded counting of OG tableaux suggests that the positive orthogonal Grassmannian constitutes a combinatorial polytope.