In this Letter, we derive new expressions for tree-level graviton amplitudes in $\mathcal{N}=8$ supergravity from Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten (BCFW) recursion relations combined with new types of bonus relations. These bonus relations go beyond the famous $1/z^2$ behavior under a large BCFW shift and use knowledge about certain zeros of graviton amplitudes in collinear kinematics. This extra knowledge can be used in the context of global residue theorems by writing the amplitude in a special form using canonical building blocks. In the next-to-maximally-helicity-violating case, these building blocks are dressed one-loop leading singularities, the same objects that appear in the expansion of Yang-Mills amplitudes, where each term corresponds to an $R$ invariant. Unlike other approaches, our formula is not an expansion in terms of cyclic objects and does not manifest color-kinematics duality but rather preserves the permutational symmetry of its building blocks. We also comment on the possible connection to Grassmannian geometry and give some nontrivial evidence of such structure for graviton amplitudes.

• Received 21 September 2023
• Accepted 22 November 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.251601

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Published by the American Physical Society