I’m back from the conference in Santa Barbara, and I thought I’d share a few things I found interesting. (For my non-physicist readers: I know it’s been a bit more technical than usual recently, I promise I’ll get back to some general audience stuff soon!)

James Drummond talked about efforts to extend the hexagon function method I work on to amplitudes with seven (or more) particles. In general, the method involves starting with a guess for what an amplitude should look like, and honing that guess based on behavior in special cases where it’s easier to calculate. In one of those special cases (called the multi-Regge limit), I had thought it would be quite difficult to calculate for more than six particles, but James clarified for me that there’s really only one additional piece needed, and they’re pretty close to having a complete understanding of it.

There were a few talks about ways to think about amplitudes in quantum field theory as the output of a string theory-like setup. There’s been progress pushing to higher quantum-ness, and in understanding the weird web of interconnected theories this setup gives rise to. In the comments, Thoglu asked about one part of this web of theories called Z theory.

Z theory is weird. Most of the theories that come out of this “web” come from a consistent sort of logic: just like you can “square” Yang-Mills to get gravity, you can “square” other theories to get more unusual things. In possibly the oldest known example, you can “square” the part of string theory that looks like Yang-Mills at low energy (open strings) to get the part that looks like gravity (closed strings). Z theory asks: could the open string also come from “multiplying” two theories together? Weirdly enough, the answer is yes: it comes from “multiplying” normal Yang-Mills with a part that takes care of the “stringiness”, a part which Oliver Schlotterer is calling “Z theory”. It’s not clear whether this Z theory makes sense as a theory on its own (for the experts: it may not even be unitary) but it is somewhat surprising that you can isolate a “building block” that just takes care of stringiness.

Peter Young in the comments asked about the Correlahedron. Scattering amplitudes ask a specific sort of question: if some particles come in from very far away, what’s the chance they scatter off each other and some other particles end up very far away? Correlators ask a more general question, about the relationships of quantum fields at different places and times, of which amplitudes are a special case. Just as the Amplituhedron is a geometrical object that specifies scattering amplitudes (in a particular theory), the Correlahedron is supposed to represent correlators (in the same theory). In some sense (different from the sense above) it’s the “square” of the Amplituhedron, and the process that gets you from it to the Amplituhedron is a geometrical version of the process that gets you from the correlator to the amplitude.

For the Amplituhedron, there’s a reasonably smooth story of how to get the amplitude. News articles tended to say the amplitude was the “volume” of the Amplituhedron, but that’s not quite correct. In fact, to find the amplitude you need to add up, not the inside of the Amplituhedron, but something that goes infinite at the Amplituhedron’s boundaries. Finding this “something” can be done on a case by case basis, but it get tricky in more complicated cases.

For the Correlahedron, this part of the story is missing: they don’t know how to define this “something”, the old recipe doesn’t work. Oddly enough, this actually makes me optimistic. This part of the story is something that people working on the Amplituhedron have been trying to avoid for a while, to find a shape where they can more honestly just take the volume. The fact that the old story doesn’t work for the Correlahedron suggests that it might provide some insight into how to build the Amplituhedron in a different way, that bypasses this problem.

There were several more talks by mathematicians trying to understand various aspects of the Amplituhedron. One of them was by Hugh Thomas, who as a fun coincidence actually went to high school with Nima Arkani-Hamed, one of the Amplituhedron’s inventors. He’s now teamed up with Nima and Jaroslav Trnka to try to understand what it means to be inside the Amplituhedron. In the original setup, they had a recipe to generate points inside the Amplituhedron, but they didn’t have a fully geometrical picture of what put them “inside”. Unlike with a normal shape, with the Amplituhedron you can’t just check which side of the wall you’re on. Instead, they can flatten the Amplituhedron, and observe that for points “inside” the Amplituhedron winds around them a specific number of times (hence “Unwinding the Amplituhedron“). Flatten it down to a line and you can read this off from the list of flips over your point, an on-off sequence like binary. If you’ve ever heard the buzzword “scattering amplitudes as binary code”, this is where that comes from.

They also have a better understanding of how supersymmetry shows up in the Amplituhedron, which Song He talked about in his talk. Previously, supersymmetry looked to be quite central, part of the basic geometric shape. Now, they can instead understand it in a different way, with the supersymmetric part coming from derivatives (for the specialists: differential forms) of the part in normal space and time. The encouraging thing is that you can include these sorts of derivatives even if your theory isn’t supersymmetric, to keep track of the various types of particles, and Song provided a few examples in his talk. This is important, because it opens up the possibility that something Amplituhedron-like could be found for a non-supersymmetric theory. Along those lines, Nima talked about ways that aspects of the “nice” description of space and time we use for the Amplituhedron can be generalized to other messier theories.

While he didn’t talk about it at the conference, Jake Bourjaily has a new paper out about a refinement of the generalized unitarity technique I talked about a few weeks back. Generalized unitarity involves matching a “cut up” version of an amplitude to a guess. What Jake is proposing is that in at least some cases you can start with a guess that’s as easy to work with as possible, where each piece of the guess matches up to just one of the “cuts” that you’re checking.  Think about it like a game of twenty questions where you’ve divided all possible answers into twenty individual boxes: for each box, you can just ask “is it in this box”?

Finally, I’ve already talked about the highlight of the conference, so I can direct you to that post for more details. I’ll just mention here that there’s still a fair bit of work to do for Zvi Bern and collaborators to get their result into a form they can check, since the initial output of their setup is quite messy. It’s led to worries about whether they’ll have enough computer power at higher loops, but I’m confident that they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.