I’m at UCLA this week, for the workshop QCD Meets Gravity. I haven’t worked on QCD or gravity yet, so I’m mostly here as an interested observer, and as an excuse to enjoy Los Angeles in December.

I think there’s a song about this…

QCD Meets Gravity is a conference centered around the various ways that “gravity is Yang-Mills squared”. There are a number of tricks that let you “square” calculations in Yang-Mills theories (a type of theory that includes QCD) to get calculations in gravity, and this conference showcased most of them.

At Amplitudes this summer, I was disappointed there were so few surprises. QCD Meets Gravity was different, with several talks on new or preliminary results, including one by Julio Parra-Martinez where the paper went up in the last few minutes of the talk! Yu-tin Huang talked about his (still-unpublished) work with Nima Arkani-Hamed on “UV/IR Polytopes”. The story there is a bit like the conformal bootstrap, with constraints (in this case based on positivity) marking off a space of “allowed” theories. String theory, interestingly, is quite close to the boundary of what is allowed. Enrico Herrmann is working on a way to figure out which gravity integrands are going to diverge without actually integrating them, while Simon Caron-Huot, in his characteristic out-of-the-box style, is wondering whether supersymmetric black holes precess. We also heard a bit more about a few recent papers. Oliver Schlotterer’s talk cleared up one thing: apparently the GEF functions he defines in his paper on one-loop “Z theory” are pronounced “Jeff”. I kept waiting for him to announce “Jeff theory”, but unfortunately no such luck. Sebastian Mizera’s talk was a very clear explanation of intersection theory, the subject of his recent paper. As it turns out, intersection theory is the study of mathematical objects like the Beta function (which shows up extensively in string theory), taking them apart in a way very reminiscent of the “squaring” story of Yang-Mills and gravity.

The heart of the workshop this year was gravitational waves. Since LIGO started running, amplitudes researchers (including, briefly, me) have been looking for ways to get involved. This conference’s goal was to bring together amplitudes people and the gravitational wave community, to get a clearer idea of what we can contribute. Between talks and discussions, I feel like we all understand the problem better. Some things that the amplitudes community thought were required, like breaking the symmetries of special relativity, turn out to be accidents of how the gravitational wave community calculates things: approximations that made things easier for them, but make things harder for us. There are areas in which we can make progress quite soon, even areas in which amplitudes people have already made progress. The detectors for which the new predictions matter might still be in the future (LIGO can measure two or three “loops”, LISA will see up to four), but they will eventually be measured. Amplitudes and gravitational wave physics could turn out to be a very fruitful partnership.