During Zoomplitudes (my field’s big yearly conference, this year on Zoom) I didn’t have time to write a long blog post. I said a bit about the format, but didn’t get a chance to talk about the science. I figured this week I’d go back and give a few more of my impressions. As always, conference posts are a bit more technical than my usual posts, so regulars be warned!

The conference opened with a talk by Gavin Salam, there as an ambassador for LHC physics. Salam pointed out that, while a decent proportion of speakers at Amplitudes mention the LHC in their papers, that fraction has fallen over the years. (Another speaker jokingly wondered which of those mentions were just in the paper’s introduction.) He argued that there is still useful work for us, LHC measurements that will require serious amplitudes calculations to understand. He also brought up what seems like the most credible argument for a new, higher-energy collider: that there are important properties of the Higgs, in particular its interactions, that we still have not observed.

The next few talks hopefully warmed Salam’s heart, as they featured calculations for real-world particle physics. Nathaniel Craig and Yael Shadmi in particular covered the link between amplitudes and Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT), a method to systematically characterize corrections beyond the Standard Model. Shadmi’s talk struck me because the kind of work she described (building the SMEFT “amplitudes-style”, directly from observable information rather than more complicated proxies) is something I’d seen people speculate about for a while, but which hadn’t been done until quite recently. Now, several groups have managed it, and look like they’ve gotten essentially “all the way there”, rather than just partial results that only manage to replicate part of the SMEFT. Overall it’s much faster progress than I would have expected.

After Shadmi’s talk was a brace of talks on N=4 super Yang-Mills, featuring cosmic Galois theory and an impressively groan-worthy “origin story” joke. The final talk of the day, by Hofie Hannesdottir, covered work with some of my colleagues at the NBI. Due to coronavirus I hadn’t gotten to hear about this in person, so it was good to hear a talk on it, a blend of old methods and new priorities to better understand some old discoveries.

The next day focused on a topic that has grown in importance in our community, calculations for gravitational wave telescopes like LIGO. Several speakers focused on new methods for collisions of spinning objects, where a few different approaches are making good progress (Radu Roiban’s proposal to use higher-spin field theory was particularly interesting) but things still aren’t quite “production-ready”. The older, post-Newtonian method is still very much production-ready, as evidenced by Michele Levi’s talk that covered, among other topics, our recent collaboration. Julio Parra-Martinez discussed some interesting behavior shared by both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric gravity theories. Thibault Damour had previously expressed doubts about use of amplitudes methods to answer this kind of question, and part of Parra-Martinez’s aim was to confirm the calculation with methods Damour would consider more reliable. Damour (who was actually in the audience, which I suspect would not have happened at an in-person conference) had already recanted some related doubts, but it’s not clear to me whether that extended to the results Parra-Martinez discussed (or whether Damour has stated the problem with his old analysis).

There were a few talks that day that didn’t relate to gravitational waves, though this might have been an accident, since both speakers also work on that topic. Zvi Bern’s talk linked to the previous day’s SMEFT discussion, with a calculation using amplitudes methods of direct relevance to SMEFT researchers. Clifford Cheung’s talk proposed a rather strange/fun idea, conformal symmetry in negative dimensions!

Wednesday was “amplituhedron day”, with a variety of talks on positive geometries and cluster algebras. Featured in several talks was “tropicalization“, a mathematical procedure that can simplify complicated geometries while still preserving essential features. Here, it was used to trim down infinite “alphabets” conjectured for some calculations into a finite set, and in doing so understand the origin of “square root letters”. The day ended with a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed, who despite offering to bet that he could finish his talk within the half-hour slot took almost twice that. The organizers seemed to have planned for this, since there was one fewer talk that day, and as such the day ended at roughly the usual time regardless.

For lack of a better name, I’ll call Thursday’s theme “celestial”. The day included talks by cosmologists (including approaches using amplitudes-ish methods from Daniel Baumann and Charlotte Sleight, and a curiously un-amplitudes-related talk from Daniel Green), talks on “celestial amplitudes” (amplitudes viewed from the surface of an infinitely distant sphere), and various talks with some link to string theory. I’m including in that last category intersection theory, which has really become its own thing. This included a talk by Simon Caron-Huot about using intersection theory more directly in understanding Feynman integrals, and a talk by Sebastian Mizera using intersection theory to investigate how gravity is Yang-Mills squared. Both gave me a much better idea of the speakers’ goals. In Mizera’s case he’s aiming for something very ambitious. He wants to use intersection theory to figure out when and how one can “double-copy” theories, and might figure out why the procedure “got stuck” at five loops. The day ended with a talk by Pedro Vieira, who gave an extremely lucid and well-presented “blackboard-style” talk on bootstrapping amplitudes.

Friday was a grab-bag of topics. Samuel Abreu discussed an interesting calculation using the numerical unitarity method. It was notable in part because renormalization played a bigger role than it does in most amplitudes work, and in part because they now have a cool logo for their group’s software, Caravel. Claude Duhr and Ruth Britto gave a two-part talk on their work on a Feynman integral coaction. I’d had doubts about the diagrammatic coaction they had worked on in the past because it felt a bit ad-hoc. Now, they’re using intersection theory, and have a clean story that seems to tie everything together. Andrew McLeod talked about our work on a Feynman diagram Calabi-Yau “bestiary”, while Cristian Vergu had a more rigorous understanding of our “traintrack” integrals.

There are two key elements of a conference that are tricky to do on Zoom. You can’t do a conference dinner, so you can’t do the traditional joke-filled conference dinner speech. The end of the conference is also tricky: traditionally, this is when everyone applauds the organizers and the secretaries are given flowers. As chair for the last session, Lance Dixon stepped up to fill both gaps, with a closing speech that was both a touching tribute to the hard work of organizing the conference and a hilarious pile of in-jokes, including a participation award to Arkani-Hamed for his (unprecedented, as far as I’m aware) perfect attendance.