I got a new paper out last week, with Andrew McLeod, Henrik Munch, and Georgios Papathanasiou.

A while back, some collaborators and I found an interesting set of Feynman diagrams that we called “Omega”. These Omega diagrams were fun because they let us avoid one of the biggest limitations of particle physics: that we usually have to compute approximations, diagram by diagram, rather than finding an exact answer. For these Omegas, we figured out how to add all the infinite set of Omega diagrams up together, with no approximation.

One implication of this was that, in principle, we now knew the answer for each individual Omega diagram, far past what had been computed before. However, writing down these answers was easier said than done. After some wrangling, we got the answer for each diagram in terms of an infinite sum. But despite tinkering with it for a while, even our resident infinite sum expert Georgios Papathanasiou couldn’t quite sum them up.

Naturally, this made me think the sums would make a great Master’s project.

When Henrik Munch showed up looking for a project, Andrew McLeod and I gave him several options, but he settled on the infinite sums. Impressively, he ended up solving the problem in two different ways!

First, he found an old paper none of us had seen before, that gave a general method for solving that kind of infinite sum. When he realized that method was really annoying to program, he took the principle behind it, called telescoping, and came up with his own, simpler method, for our particular case.

Picture an old-timey folding telescope. It might be long when fully extended, but when you fold it up each piece fits inside the previous one, resulting in a much smaller object. Telescoping a sum has the same spirit. If each pair of terms in a sum “fit together” (if their difference is simple), you can rearrange them so that most of the difficulty “cancels out” and you’re left with a much simpler sum.

Henrik’s telescoping idea worked even better than expected. We found that we could do, not just the Omega sums, but other sums in particle physics as well. Infinite sums are a very well-studied field, so it was interesting to find something genuinely new.

The rest of us worked to generalize the result, to check the examples and to put it in context. But the core of the work was Henrik’s. I’m really proud of what he accomplished. If you’re looking for a PhD student, he’s on the market!