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Correlator polytopes

Carolina Figueiredo1,* and Francisco Vazão2,†

  • *Contact author: cfigueiredo@princeton.edu
  • †Contact author: fvvazao@mpp.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 025005 – Published 7 January, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bq27-6d26

Abstract

Recently, “cosmohedra” have been introduced as polytopes underlying the cosmological wave function for conformally coupled Tr(Φ3) theory in Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker cosmologies, generalizing associahedra for flat space scattering amplitudes. In this paper we show that correlation functions are also directly captured by a new polytope—the Correlatron. The combinatorics of correlation functions is an interesting blend of flat space scattering amplitudes and wave functions. This is reflected in the correlatron geometry, which is a one-higher dimensional polytope sandwiched between cosmohedron and associahedron facets. We provide an explicit embedding for the correlatron, which is a natural extension of the “shaving” picture for cosmohedra to one higher dimension. As a byproduct, we also define “graph correlahedra” as polytopes for the contribution to correlators from any fixed graph. We show how the canonical form of these polytopes directly computes the graph correlator, without the power of two weights seen in previous geometric formulations. Finally, we give a prescription for extracting the full correlator from the canonical form of the correlatron.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 025005– Published 7 January, 2026
  • Received 24 October 2025
  • Accepted 18 December 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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