I’m visiting the Institute for Advanced Study this week, on the outskirts of Princeton’s impressively Gothic campus.

A typical Princeton reading room

The IAS was designed as a place for researchers to work with minimal distraction, and we’re taking full advantage of it. (Though I wouldn’t mind a few more basic distractions…dinner closer than thirty minutes away for example.)

The amplitudes community seems to be busily working as well, with several interesting papers going up on the arXiv this week, four with some connection to the IAS.

Carlos Mafra and Oliver Schlotterer’s paper about one-loop string amplitudes mentions visiting the IAS in the acknowledgements. Mafra and Schlotterer have found a “double-copy” structure in the one-loop open string. Loosely, “double-copy” refers to situations in which one theory can be described as two theories “multiplied together”, like how “gravity is Yang-Mills squared”. Normally, open strings would be the “Yang-Mills” in that equation, with their “squares”, closed strings, giving gravity. Here though, open strings themselves are described as a “product” of two different pieces, a Yang-Mills part and one that takes care of the “stringiness”. You may remember me talking about something like this and calling it “Z theory”. That was at “tree level”, for the simplest string diagrams. This paper updates the technology to one-loop, where the part taking care of the “stringiness” has a more sophisticated mathematical structure. It’s pretty nontrivial for this kind of structure to survive at one loop, and it suggests something deeper is going on.

Yvonne Geyer (IAS) and Ricardo Monteiro (non-IAS) work on the ambitwistor string, a string theory-like setup for calculating particle physics amplitudes. Their paper shows how this setup can be used for one-loop amplitudes in a wide range of theories, in particular theories without supersymmetry. This makes some patterns that were observed before quite a bit clearer, and leads to a fairly concise way of writing the amplitudes.

Nima-watchers will be excited about a paper by Nima Arkani-Hamed and his student Yuntao Bai (IAS) and Song He and his student Gongwang Yan (non-IAS). This paper is one that has been promised for quite some time, Nima talked about it at Amplitudes last summer. Nima is famous for the amplituhedron, an abstract geometrical object that encodes amplitudes in one specific theory, N=4 super Yang-Mills. Song He is known for the Cachazo-He-Yuan (or CHY) string, a string-theory like picture of particle scattering in a very general class of theories that is closely related to the ambitwistor string. Collaborating, they’ve managed to link the two pictures together, and in doing so take the first step to generalizing the amplituhedron to other theories. In order to do this they had to think about the amplituhedron not in terms of some abstract space, but in terms of the actual momenta of the particles they’re colliding. This is important because the amplituhedron’s abstract space is very specific to N=4 super Yang-Mills, with supersymmetry in some sense built in, while momenta can be written down for any particles. Once they had mastered this trick, they could encode other things in this space of momenta: colors of quarks, for example. Using this, they’ve managed to find amplituhedron-like structure in the CHY string, and in a few particular theories. They still can’t do everything the amplituhedron can, in particular the amplituhedron can go to any number of loops while the structures they’re finding are tree-level. But the core trick they’re using looks very powerful. I’ve been hearing hints about the trick from Nima for so long that I had forgotten they hadn’t published it yet, now that they have I’m excited to see what the amplitudes community manages to do with it.

Finally, last night a paper by Igor Prlina, Marcus Spradlin, James Stankowicz, Stefan Stanojevic, and Anastasia Volovich went up while three of the authors were visiting the IAS. The paper deals with Landau equations, a method to classify and predict the singularities of amplitudes. By combining this method with the amplituhedron they’ve already made substantial progress, and this paper serves as a fairly thorough proof of principle, using the method to comprehensively catalog the singularities of one-loop amplitudes. In this case I’ve been assured that they have papers at higher loops in the works, so it will be interesting to see how powerful this method ends up being.