Motivic Geometry of two-Loop Feynman Integrals

Abstract We study the geometry and Hodge theory of the cubic hypersurfaces attached to two-loop Feynman integrals for generic physical parameters. We show that the Hodge structure attached to planar two-loop Feynman graphs decomposes into mixed Tate pieces and the Hodge structures of families of hyperelliptic, elliptic or rational curves depending on the space-time dimension. For two-loop graphs with a small number of edges, we give more precise results. In particular, we recover a result of Bloch (Double box motive. SIGMA 2021;17,048) that in the well-known double-box example, there is an underlying family of elliptic curves, and we give a concrete description of these elliptic curves. We show that the motive for the non-planar two-loop tardigrade graph is that of a K3 surface. In an appendix by Eric Pichon-Pharabod, we argue via high-precision numerical computations that the Picard number of this K3 surface is generically 11 and we compute the expected lattice polarization. Lastly, we show that generic members of the ice cream cone family of graph hypersurfaces correspond to the pairs of sunset Calabi–Yau varieties.