Feynman motives of banana graphs

Paolo Aluffi, Matilde Marcolli

We consider the infinite family of Feynman graphs known as the ``banana graphs'' and compute explicitly the classes of the corresponding graph hypersurfaces in the Grothendieck ring of varieties as well as their Chern--Schwartz--MacPherson classes, using the classical Cremona transformation and the dual graph, and a blowup formula for characteristic classes. We outline the interesting similarities between these operations and we give formulae for cones obtained by simple operations on graphs. We formulate a positivity conjecture for characteristic classes of graph hypersurfaces and discuss briefly the effect of passing to noncommutative spacetime.