Seminar

The use of motivic techniques in Quantum Field Theory has been widely explored in the past ten years, in relation to the occurrence of periods in the computation of Feynman integrals. In this lecture, based on joint work with Aluffi, I will show how some of these techniques can be extended to a motivic analysis of the partition function of Potts models in statistical mechanics. An estimate of the complexity of the locus of zeros of the partition function, can be obtained in terms of the classes in the Grothendieck ring of the affine algebraic varieties defined by the vanishing of the multivariate Tutte polynomial, based on a deletion-contraction formula for the Grothendieck classes.