Feynman integrals, \(L\)-series and Kloosterman moments (Q505019)

The article touches three different fields of science: Quantum field theory, algebraic geometry and number theory, as staed in the first sentence of the abstract. Number theory and quantum field theory figure prominently in this article, with algebraic geometry residing in the background. The article starts on the number theory side with the definition of Kloosterman sums in finite fields, given in eq.(5). Two central quantities of this article are on the one hand the Bessel moments \(c_n(q)\), defined in eq.(6) with \(n\) a natural number and \(q=p^k\) the order of the finite field, and on the other hand the polynomial \(Z_n(p,T)\) in the variable \(T\), defined in eq.(7). The prime number \(p\) is the characteristic of the finite field. The Bessel moments \(c_n(p^k)\) are predictable for \(k\) large enough from the values at smaller \(k\). Theorem 1 of this article states that they are predictable for \(k>d(p,n)\) and gives a generating function for the net degree \(d(p,n)\). This article contains several conjectures (seven, to be precise), which are based on extensive numerical testing. This requires fast numerical computations and efficient algorithms to compute the quantities \(c_n(p^k)\) and \(Z_n(p,T)\) are presented in sections 3 and 6 (algorithms 1-3). On the quantum field theory side this article is concerned with two types of Feynman diagrams: (a) vacuum diagrams with two vertices and \((s+1)\) internal propagators and (b) sunrise diagrams (also called sometimes banana diagrams) with two vertices, \((s+1)\) internal propagators and two external lines. All internal propagators have equal mass, in the case of the sunrise diagrams the external lines are on-shell, i.e. the square of the four-momentum flowing through these lines equals the internal mass squared. The Feynman integrals are considered in two space-time dimensions, where they are finite. If the mass is set to one, the Feynman integrals evaluate to numbers, which are denoted by \(S_{n,s}\) with \(n=s+1\) for the vacuum diagrams and \(n=s+2\) for the sunrise diagrams. There is a well-known representation for \(S_{n,s}\) in the form of a one-fold integral over \(n\) Bessel functions, given in eq.(84). The Bessel moments \(c_n(q)\) and the Feynman integrals are not unrelated. For \(n<8\) the author shows that one may define from the Bessel moments an \(L\)-series through eq.(80). These \(L\)-series have a critical strip and the author shows for \(n<5\) and conjectures for \(n<8\) that the Feynman integrals \(S_{n,s}\) are related to values of the \(L\)-series at integers. For \(n=8\) the definition of the \(L\)-series is modified in eq.(137) and again there is a conjecture that the evaluation of the six-loop sunrise integral \(S_{8,6}\) is related to a value of \(L_8\) at an integer, stated precisely in eq.(146). The last section of this article is devoted to efforts in pushing the relations between the numbers \(S_{n,s}\) and values of \(L\)-functions at integers beyond \(n=8\). At the time of writing this review I should mention that in the meantime the author has suceeded in pushing this frontier to an impressive \(n \leq 18\) [the author, ``Amplitudes -- practical and theoretical developments'' (2017), \url{https://indico.mitp.uni-mainz.de/event/70/contribution/0/material/slides/0.pdf}].