A Combinatorial Origin of Locality
Abstract
Locality and unitarity are fundamental principles of quantum field theory. For tree-level scattering amplitudes, locality determines which propagator poles may occur together, while unitarity fixes their residues through factorization. Previous uniqueness theorems have repeatedly shown that unitarity can emerge from locality combined with other physical principles. In this Letter we give the first complete all-multiplicity proof for the emergence of locality in this setting. We focus on Tr(ϕ3) theory and phrase locality as a problem in geometric combinatorics. Planar propagators are chords of a polygon, and a denominator is local exactly when its chords triangulate the polygon, and non-local otherwise. We show that hidden zeros---regular kinematic conditions on which the amplitude vanishes---enforce pole compatibility and therefore imply a local singularity structure. The proof rests on two ingredients: a graphical \emph{star test} determines when a chosen zero eliminates a pole product, and a \emph{smoothing} procedure finds such a zero. Thus, once the planar pole alphabet and denominator bound are specified, locality and unitarity emerge together from a single on-shell principle: hidden zeros. Equivalently, our proof provides a novel characterization of a familiar concept: polygon triangulations are precisely the chord configurations that evade every star test.
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BibTeX
@misc{rodina2026combinatorial,
title = {{A Combinatorial Origin of Locality}},
author = {Laurentiu Rodina and Giuseppe Sellaroli and Yan Ni},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.23008},
eprint = {2608.23008},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23008},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Combinatorial Origin of Locality
AU - Laurentiu Rodina
AU - Giuseppe Sellaroli
AU - Yan Ni
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.23008
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23008
AB - Locality and unitarity are fundamental principles of quantum field theory. For tree-level scattering amplitudes, locality determines which propagator poles may occur together, while unitarity fixes their residues through factorization. Previous uniqueness theorems have repeatedly shown that unitarity can emerge from locality combined with other physical principles. In this Letter we give the first complete all-multiplicity proof for the emergence of locality in this setting. We focus on Tr(ϕ^3) theory and phrase locality as a problem in geometric combinatorics. Planar propagators are chords of a polygon, and a denominator is local exactly when its chords triangulate the polygon, and non-local otherwise. We show that hidden zeros---regular kinematic conditions on which the amplitude vanishes---enforce pole compatibility and therefore imply a local singularity structure. The proof rests on two ingredients: a graphical \emph{star test} determines when a chosen zero eliminates a pole product, and a \emph{smoothing} procedure finds such a zero. Thus, once the planar pole alphabet and denominator bound are specified, locality and unitarity emerge together from a single on-shell principle: hidden zeros. Equivalently, our proof provides a novel characterization of a familiar concept: polygon triangulations are precisely the chord configurations that evade every star test.
ER -