I have a new paper out this week. It’s the long-awaited companion to a paper I blogged about a few months back, itself the latest step in a program that has made up a major chunk of my research.

The title is a bit of a mouthful, but I’ll walk you through it:

The Cosmic Galois Group and Extended Steinmann Relations for Planar N = 4 SYM Amplitudes

I calculate scattering amplitudes (roughly, probabilities that elementary particles bounce off each other) in a (not realistic, and not meant to be) theory called planar N=4 super-Yang-Mills (SYM for short). I can’t summarize everything we’ve been doing here, but if you read the blog posts I linked above and some of the Handy Handbooks linked at the top of the page you’ll hopefully get a clearer picture.

We started using the Steinmann Relations a few years ago. Discovered in the 60’s, the Steinmann relations restrict the kind of equations we can use to describe particle physics. Essentially, they mean that particles can’t travel two ways at once. In this paper, we extend the Steinmann relations beyond Steinmann’s original idea. We don’t yet know if we can prove this extension works, but it seems to be true for the amplitudes we’re calculating. While we’ve presented this in talks before, this is the first time we’ve published it, and it’s one of the big results of this paper.

The other, more exotic-sounding result, has to do with something called the Cosmic Galois Group.

Évariste Galois, the famously duel-prone mathematician, figured out relations between algebraic numbers (that is, numbers you can get out of algebraic equations) in terms of a mathematical structure called a group. Today, mathematicians are interested not just in algebraic numbers, but in relations between transcendental numbers as well, specifically a kind of transcendental number called a period. These numbers show up a lot in physics, so mathematicians have been thinking about a Galois group for transcendental numbers that show up in physics, a so-called Cosmic Galois Group.

(Cosmic here doesn’t mean it has to do with cosmology. As far as I can tell, mathematicians just thought it sounded cool and physics-y. They also started out with rather ambitious ideas about it, if you want a laugh check out the last few paragraphs of this talk by Cartier.)

For us, Cosmic Galois Theory lets us study the unusual numbers that show up in our calculations. Doing this, we’ve noticed that certain numbers simply don’t show up. For example, the Riemann zeta function shows up often in our results, evaluated at many different numbers…but never evaluated at the number three. Nor does any number related to that one through the Cosmic Galois Group show up. It’s as if the theory only likes some numbers, and not others.

This weird behavior has been observed before. Mathematicians can prove it happens for some simple theories, but it even applies to the theories that describe the real world, for example to calculations of the way an electron’s path is bent by a magnetic field. Each theory seems to have its own preferred family of numbers.

For us, this has been enormously useful. We calculate our amplitudes by guesswork, starting with the right “alphabet” and then filling in different combinations, as if we’re trying all possible answers to a word jumble. Cosmic Galois Theory and Extended Steinmann have enabled us to narrow down our guess dramatically, making it much easier and faster to get to the right answer.

More generally though, we hope to contribute to mathematicians’ investigations of Cosmic Galois Theory. Our examples are more complicated than the simple theories where they currently prove things, and contain more data than the more limited results from electrons. Hopefully together we can figure out why certain numbers show up and others don’t, and find interesting mathematical principles behind the theories that govern fundamental physics.

For now, I’ll leave you with a preview of a talk I’m giving in a couple weeks’ time: