The Positive Tropical Grassmannian, the Hypersimplex, and them= 2 Amplituhedron

Abstract The positive Grassmannian Gr^ 0₊, ₍ is a cell complex consisting of all points in the real Grassmannian whose Plücker coordinates are non-negative. In this paper we consider the image of the positive Grassmannian and its positroid cells under two different maps: the moment map onto the hypersimplex 31 and the amplituhedron mapZ onto the amplituhedron 6. For either map, we define a positroid dissection to be a collection of images of positroid cells that are disjoint and cover a dense subset of the image. Positroid dissections of the hypersimplex are of interest because they include many matroid subdivisions; meanwhile, positroid dissections of the amplituhedron can be used to calculate the amplituhedron’s ‘volume’, which in turn computes scattering amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills. We define a map we call T-duality from cells of Gr^ 0₊+₁, ₍ to cells of Gr^ 0₊, ₍ and conjecture that it induces a bijection from positroid dissections of the hypersimplex ₊+₁, ₍ to positroid dissections of the amplituhedron A₍, ₊, ₂; we prove this conjecture for the (infinite) class of BCFW dissections. We note that T-duality is particularly striking because the hypersimplex is an (n-1) -dimensional polytope while the amplituhedron A₍, ₊, ₂ is a 2k-dimensional non-polytopal subset of the Grassmannian Gr₊, ₊+₂. Moreover, we prove that the positive tropical Grassmannian is the secondary fan for the regular positroid subdivisions of the hypersimplex, and prove that a matroid polytope is a positroid polytope if and only if all 2D faces are positroid polytopes. Finally, toward the goal of generalizing T-duality for higher m, we define the momentum amplituhedron for any even m.