Grass(mannian) trees and forests: Variations of the exponential formula, with applications to the momentum amplituhedron

Abstract

The Exponential Formula allows one to enumerate any class of combinatorial objects built by choosing a set of connected components and placing a structure on each connected component which depends only on its size. There are multiple variants of this result, including Speicher’s result for noncrossing partitions, as well as analogues of the Exponential Formula for series-reduced planar trees and forests. In this paper we use these formulae to give generating functions for contracted Grassmannian trees and forests, certain graphs whose vertices are decorated with a helicity. Along the way we enumerate bipartite planar trees and forests, and we apply our results to enumerate various families of permutations: for example, bipartite planar trees are in bijection with separable permutations. It is postulated by Livia Ferro, Tomasz Łukowski and Robert Moerman (2020) that contracted Grassmannian forests are in bijection with boundary strata of the momentum amplituhedron, an object encoding the tree-level S-matrix of maximally supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory. With this assumption, our results give a rank generating function for the boundary strata of the momentum amplituhedron, and imply that the Euler characteristic of the momentum amplituhedron is 1.