I’ve been busy running a conference this week, Elliptics and Beyond.

After Amplitudes was held online this year, a few of us at the Niels Bohr Institute were inspired. We thought this would be the perfect time to hold a small online conference, focused on the Calabi-Yaus that have been popping up lately in Feynman diagrams. Then we heard from the organizers of Elliptics 2020. They had been planning to hold a conference in Mainz about elliptic integrals in Feynman diagrams, but had to postpone it due to the pandemic. We decided to team up and hold a joint conference on both topics: the elliptic integrals that are just starting to be understood, and the mysterious integrals that lie beyond. Hence, Elliptics and Beyond.

The conference has been fun thus far. There’s been a mix of review material bringing people up to speed on elliptic integrals and exciting new developments. Some are taking methods that have been successful in other areas and generalizing them to elliptic integrals, others have been honing techniques for elliptics to make them “production-ready”. A few are looking ahead even further, to higher-genus amplitudes in string theory and Calabi-Yaus in Feynman diagrams.

We organized the conference along similar lines to Zoomplitudes, but with a few experiments of our own. Like Zoomplitudes, we made a Slack space for the conference, so people could chat physics outside the talks. Ours was less active, though. I suspect that kind of space needs a critical mass of people, and with a smaller conference we may just not have gotten there. Having fewer people did allow us a more relaxed schedule, which in turn meant we could mostly keep things on-time. We had discussion sessions in the morning (European time), with talks in the afternoon, so almost everyone could make the talks at least. We also had a “conference dinner”, which went much better than I would have expected. We put people randomly into Zoom Breakout Rooms of five or six, to emulate the tables of an in-person conference, and folks chatted while eating their (self-brought of course) dinner. People seemed to really enjoy the chance to just chat casually with the other folks at the conference. If you’re organizing an online conference soon, I’d recommend trying it!

Holding a conference online means that a lot of people can attend who otherwise couldn’t. We had over a hundred people register, and while not all of them showed up there were typically fifty or sixty people on the Zoom session. Some of these were specialists in elliptics or Calabi-Yaus who wouldn’t ordinarily make it to a conference like this. Others were people from the rest of the amplitudes field who joined for parts of the conference that caught their eye. But surprisingly many weren’t even amplitudeologists, but students and young researchers in a variety of topics from all over the world. Some seemed curious and eager to learn, others I suspect just needed to say they had been to a conference. Both are responding to a situation where suddenly conference after conference is available online, free to join. It will be interesting to see if, and how, the world adapts.