Interesting amplitudes papers seem to come in groups. Several interesting papers went up this week, and I’ve been too busy to read any of them!

Well, that’s not quite true, I did manage to read this paper, by James Drummond, Jack Foster, and Omer Gurdogan. At six pages long, it wasn’t hard to fit in, and the result could be quite useful. The way my collaborators and I calculate amplitudes involves building up a mathematical object called a symbol, described in terms of a string of “letters”. What James and collaborators have found is a restriction on which “letters” can appear next to each other, based on the properties of a mathematical object called a cluster algebra. Oddly, the restriction seems to have the same effect as a more physics-based condition we’d been using earlier. This suggests that the abstract mathematical restriction and the physics-based restriction are somehow connected, but we don’t yet understand how. It also could be useful for letting us calculate amplitudes with more particles: previously we thought the number of “letters” we’d have to consider there was going to be infinite, but with James’s restriction we’d only need to consider a finite number.

I didn’t get a chance to read David Dunbar, John Godwin, Guy Jehu, and Warren Perkins’s paper. They’re computing amplitudes in QCD (which unlike N=4 super Yang-Mills actually describes the real world!) and doing so for fairly complicated arrangements of particles. They claim to get remarkably simple expressions: since that sort of claim was what jump-started our investigations into N=4, I should probably read this if only to see if there’s something there in the real world amenable to our technique.

I also haven’t read Rutger Boels and Hui Lui’s paper yet. From the abstract, I’m still not clear which parts of what they’re describing is new, or how much it improves on existing methods. It will probably take a more thorough reading to find out.

I really ought to read Burkhard Eden, Yunfeng Jiang, Dennis le Plat, and Alessandro Sfondrini’s paper. They’re working on a method referred to as the Hexagon Operator Product Expansion, or HOPE. It’s related to an older method, the Pentagon Operator Product Expansion (POPE), but applicable to trickier cases. I’ve been keeping an eye on the HOPE in part because my collaborators have found the POPE very useful, and the HOPE might enable something similar. It will be interesting to find out how Eden et al.’s paper modifies the HOPE story.

Finally, I’ll probably find the time to read my former colleague Sebastian Mizera’s paper. He’s found a connection between the string-theory-like CHY picture of scattering amplitudes and some unusual mathematical structures. I’m not sure what to make of it until I get a better idea of what those structures are.