Self-duality from twisted cohomology

A bstract Recently a notion of self-duality for differential equations of maximal cuts was introduced, which states that there should be a basis in which the matrix for an ε -factorised differential equation is persymmetric. It was observed that the rotation to this special basis may introduce a Galois symmetry relating different integrals. We argue that the proposed notion of self-duality for maximal cuts stems from a very natural notion of self-duality from twisted cohomology. Our main result is that, if the differential equations and their duals are simultaneously brought into canonical form, the cohomology intersection matrix is a constant. Furthermore, we show that one can associate quite generically a Lie algebra representation to an ε -factorised system. For maximal cuts, this representation is irreducible and self-dual. The constant intersection matrix can be interpreted as expressing the equivalence of this representation and its dual, which in turn results in constraints for the differential equation matrix. Unlike the earlier proposal, the most natural symmetry of the differential equation matrix is defined entirely over the rational numbers and is independent of the basis choice.