Serendipitous Syzygies of Scattering Amplitudes

Abstract

We study linear relations between color-ordered all-plus amplitudes at one loop in Yang--Mills theory. We show that on general grounds, there are $(n-1)!/2-2$ relations for $n\ge 5$, leaving only two independent color-ordered amplitudes. We present two complementary approaches to finding such relations: one using numerical linear algebra and the other using syzygies in computational algebraic geometry. We obtain explicit forms for all relations through $n=7$. We also study relations for the tree-level MHV amplitudes through $n=8$. The latter relations include the well-known color and Bern--Carrasco--Johansson identities.