This blog is named for a question: does the four-graviton amplitude in N=8 supergravity diverge?
Over the years, Zvi Bern and a growing cast of collaborators have been trying to answer that question. They worked their way up, loop by loop, until they stalled at five loops. Last year, they finally broke the stall, and last week, they published the result of the five-loop calculation. They find that N=8 supergravity does not diverge at five loops in four dimensions, but does diverge in 24/5 dimensions. I thought I’d write a brief FAQ about the status so far.
Q: Wait a minute, 24/5 dimensions? What does that mean? Are you talking about fractals, or…
Nothing so exotic. The number 24/5 comes from a regularization trick. When we’re calculating an amplitude that might be divergent, one way to deal with it is to treat the dimension like a free variable. You can then see what happens as you vary the dimension, and see when the amplitude starts diverging. If the dimension is an integer, then this ends up matching a more physics-based picture, where you start with a theory in eleven dimensions and curl up the extra ones until you get to the dimension you’re looking for. For fractional dimensions, it’s not clear that there’s any physical picture like this: it’s just a way to talk about how close something is to diverging.
Q: I’m really confused. What’s a graviton? What is supergravity? What’s a divergence?
I don’t have enough space to explain these things here, but that’s why I write handbooks. Here are explanations of gravitons, supersymmetry, and (N=8) supergravity, loops, and divergences. Please let me know if anything in those explanations is unclear, or if you have any more questions.
Q: Why do people think that N=8 supergravity will diverge at seven loops?
There’s a useful rule of thumb in quantum field theory: anything that can happen, will happen. In this case, that means if there’s a way for a theory to diverge that’s consistent with the symmetries of the theory, then it almost always does diverge. In the past, that meant that people expected N=8 supergravity to diverge at five loops. However, researchers found a previously unknown symmetry that looked like it would forbid the five-loop divergence, and only allow a divergence at seven loops (in four dimensions). Zvi and co.’s calculation confirms that the five-loop divergence doesn’t show up.
More generally, string theory not only avoids divergences but clears up other phenomena, like black holes. These two things seem tied together: string theory cleans up problems in quantum gravity in a consistent, unified way. There isn’t a clear way for N=8 supergravity on its own to clean up these kinds of problems, which makes some people skeptical that it can match string theory’s advantages. Either way N=8 supergravity, unlike string theory, isn’t a candidate theory of nature by itself: it would need to be modified in order to describe our world, and no-one has suggested a way to do that.
Q: Why do people think that N=8 supergravity won’t diverge at seven loops?
There’s a useful rule of thumb in amplitudes: amplitudes are weird. In studying amplitudes we often notice unexpected simplifications, patterns that uncover new principles that weren’t obvious before.
Gravity in general seems to have a lot of these kinds of simplifications. Even without any loops, its behavior is surprisingly tame: it’s a theory that we can build up piece by piece from the three-particle interaction, even though naively we shouldn’t be able to (for the experts: I’m talking about large-z behavior in BCFW). This behavior seems to have an effect on one-loop amplitudes as well. There are other ways in which gravity seems better-behaved than expected, overall this suggests that we still have a fair ways to go before we understand all of the symmetries of gravity theories.
Supersymmetric gravity in particular also seems unusually well-behaved. N=5 supergravity was expected to diverge at four loops, but doesn’t. N=4 supergravity does diverge at four loops, but that seems to be due to an effect that is specific to that case (for the experts: an anomaly).
For N=8 specifically, a suggestive hint came from varying the dimension. If you checked the dimension in which the theory diverged at each loop, you’d find it matched the divergences of another theory, N=4 super Yang-Mills. At 
At five loops, N=4 super Yang-Mills diverges in 26/5 dimensions. Zvi Bern made a bet with supergravity expert Kelly Stelle that the dimension would be the same for N=8 supergravity: a bottle of California wine from Bern versus English wine from Stelle. Now that they’ve found a divergence in 24/5 dimensions instead, Stelle will likely be getting his wine soon.
Q: It sounds like the calculation was pretty tough. Can they still make it to seven loops?
I think so, yes. Doing the five-loop calculation they noticed simplifications, clever tricks uncovered by even more clever grad students. The end result is that if they just want to find out whether the theory diverges then they don’t have to do the “whole calculation”, just part of it. This simplifies things a lot. They’ll probably have to find a few more simplifications to make seven loops viable, but I’m optimistic that they’ll find them, and in the meantime the new tricks should have some applications in other theories.
Q: What do you think? Will the theory diverge?
I’m not sure.
To be honest, I’m a bit less optimistic than I used to be. The agreement of divergence dimensions between N=8 supergravity and N=4 super Yang-Mills wasn’t the strongest argument (there’s a reason why, though Stelle accepted the bet on five loops, string theorist Michael Green is waiting on seven loops for his bet). Fractional dimensions don’t obviously mean anything physically, and many of the simplifications in gravity seem specific to four dimensions. Still, it was suggestive, the kind of “motivation” that gets a conjecture started.
Without that motivation, none of the remaining arguments are specific to N=8. I still think unexpected simplifications are likely, that gravity overall behaves better than we yet appreciate. I still would bet on seven loops being finite. But I’m less confident about what it would mean for the theory overall. That’s going to take more serious analysis, digging in to the anomaly in N=4 supergravity and seeing what generalizes. It does at least seem like Zvi and co. are prepared to undertake that analysis.
Regardless, it’s still worth pushing for seven loops. Having that kind of heavy-duty calculation in our sub-field forces us to improve our mathematical technology, in the same way that space programs and particle colliders drive technology in the wider world. If you think your new amplitudes method is more efficient than the alternatives, the push to seven loops is the ideal stress test. Jacob Bourjaily likes to tell me how his prescriptive unitarity technique is better than what Zvi and co. are doing, this is our chance to find out!
Overall, I still stand by what I say in my blog’s sidebar. I’m interested in N=8 supergravity, I’d love to find out whether the four-graviton amplitude diverges…and now that the calculation is once again making progress, I expect that I will.
4 gravitons 