Tag Archives: quantum gravity

Trapped in the (S) Matrix

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I’ve tried to convince you that you are a particle detector. You choose your experiment, what actions you take, and then observe the outcome. If you focus on that view of yourself, data out and data in, you start to wonder if the world outside really has any meaning. Maybe you’re just trapped in the Matrix.

From a physics perspective, you actually are trapped in a sort of a Matrix. We call it the S Matrix.

“S” stands for scattering. The S Matrix is a formula we use, a mathematical tool that tells us what happens when fundamental particles scatter: when they fly towards each other, colliding or bouncing off. For each action we could take, the S Matrix gives the probability of each outcome: for each pair of particles we collide, the chance we detect different particles at the end. You can imagine putting every possible action in a giant vector, and every possible observation in another giant vector. Arrange the probabilities for each action-observation pair in a big square grid, and that’s a matrix.

Actually, I lied a little bit. This is particle physics, and particle physics uses quantum mechanics. Because of that, the entries of the S Matrix aren’t probabilities: they’re complex numbers called probability amplitudes. You have to multiply them by their complex conjugate to get probability out.

Ok, that probably seemed like a lot of detail. Why am I telling you all this?

What happens when you multiply the whole S Matrix by its complex conjugate? (Using matrix multiplication, naturally.) You can still pick your action, but now you’re adding up every possible outcome. You’re asking “suppose I take an action. What’s the chance that anything happens at all?”

The answer to that question is 1. There is a 100% chance that something happens, no matter what you do. That’s just how probability works.

We call this property unitarity, the property of giving “unity”, or one. And while it may seem obvious, it isn’t always so easy. That’s because we don’t actually know the S Matrix formula most of the time. We have to approximate it, a partial formula that only works for some situations. And unitarity can tell us how much we can trust that formula.

Imagine doing an experiment trying to detect neutrinos, like the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. For you to detect the neutrinos, they must scatter off of electrons, kicking them off of their atoms or transforming them into another charged particle. You can then notice what happens as the energy of the neutrinos increases. If you do that, you’ll notice the probability also start to increase: it gets more and more likely that the neutrino can scatter an electron. You might propose a formula for this, one that grows with energy. [EDIT: Example changed after a commenter pointed out an issue with it.]

If you keep increasing the energy, though, you run into a problem. Those probabilities you predict are going to keep increasing. Eventually, you’ll predict a probability greater than one.

That tells you that your theory might have been fine before, but doesn’t work for every situation. There’s something you don’t know about, which will change your formula when the energy gets high. You’ve violated unitarity, and you need to fix your theory.

In this case, the fix is already known. Neutrinos and electrons interact due to another particle, called the W boson. If you include that particle, then you fix the problem: your probabilities stop going up and up, instead, they start slowing down, and stay below one.

For other theories, we don’t yet know the fix. Try to write down an S Matrix for colliding gravitational waves (or really, gravitons), and you meet the same kind of problem, a probability that just keeps growing. Currently, we don’t know how that problem should be solved: string theory is one answer, but may not be the only one.

So even if you’re trapped in an S Matrix, sending data out and data in, you can still use logic. You can still demand that probability makes sense, that your matrix never gives a chance greater than 100%. And you can learn something about physics when you do!

At New Ideas in Cosmology

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The Niels Bohr Institute is hosting a conference this week on New Ideas in Cosmology. I’m no cosmologist, but it’s a pretty cool field, so as a local I’ve been sitting in on some of the talks. So far they’ve had a selection of really interesting speakers with quite a variety of interests, including a talk by Roger Penrose with his trademark hand-stippled drawings.

Including this old classic

One thing that has impressed me has been the “interdisciplinary” feel of the conference. By all rights this should be one “discipline”, cosmology. But in practice, each speaker came at the subject from a different direction. They all had a shared core of knowledge, common models of the universe they all compare to. But the knowledge they brought to the subject varied: some had deep knowledge of the mathematics of gravity, others worked with string theory, or particle physics, or numerical simulations. Each talk, aware of the varied audience, was a bit “colloquium-style“, introducing a framework before diving in to the latest research. Each speaker knew enough to talk to the others, but not so much that they couldn’t learn from them. It’s been unexpectedly refreshing, a real interdisciplinary conference done right.

Duality and Emergence: When Is Spacetime Not Spacetime?

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Spacetime is doomed! At least, so say some physicists. They don’t mean this as a warning, like some comic-book universe-destroying disaster, but rather as a research plan. These physicists believe that what we think of as space and time aren’t the full story, but that they emerge from something more fundamental, so that an ultimate theory of nature might not use space or time at all. Other, grumpier physicists are skeptical. Joined by a few philosophers, they think the “spacetime is doomed” crowd are over-excited and exaggerating the implications of their discoveries. At the heart of the argument is the distinction between two related concepts: duality and emergence.

In physics, sometimes we find that two theories are actually dual: despite seeming different, the patterns of observations they predict are the same. Some of the more popular examples are what we call holographic theories. In these situations, a theory of quantum gravity in some space-time is dual to a theory without gravity describing the edges of that space-time, sort of like how a hologram is a 2D image that looks 3D when you move it. For any question you can ask about the gravitational “bulk” space, there is a matching question on the “boundary”. No matter what you observe, neither description will fail.

If theories with gravity can be described by theories without gravity, does that mean gravity doesn’t really exist? If you’re asking that question, you’re asking whether gravity is emergent. An emergent theory is one that isn’t really fundamental, but instead a result of the interaction of more fundamental parts. For example, hydrodynamics, the theory of fluids like water, emerges from more fundamental theories that describe the motion of atoms and molecules.

(For the experts: I, like most physicists, am talking about “weak emergence” here, not “strong emergence”.)

The “spacetime is doomed” crowd think that not just gravity, but space-time itself is emergent. They expect that distances and times aren’t really fundamental, but a result of relationships that will turn out to be more fundamental, like entanglement between different parts of quantum fields. As evidence, they like to bring up dualities where the dual theories have different concepts of gravity, number of dimensions, or space-time. Using those theories, they argue that space and time might “break down”, and not be really fundamental.

(I’ve made arguments like that in the past too.)

The skeptics, though, bring up an important point. If two theories are really dual, then no observation can distinguish them: they make exactly the same predictions. In that case, say the skeptics, what right do you have to call one theory more fundamental than the other? You can say that gravity emerges from a boundary theory without gravity, but you could just as easily say that the boundary theory emerges from the gravity theory. The whole point of duality is that no theory is “more true” than the other: one might be more or less convenient, but both describe the same world. If you want to really argue for emergence, then your “more fundamental” theory needs to do something extra: to predict something that your emergent theory doesn’t predict.

Sometimes this is a fair objection. There are members of the “spacetime is doomed” crowd who are genuinely reckless about this, who’ll tell a journalist about emergence when they really mean duality. But many of these people are more careful, and have thought more deeply about the question. They tend to have some mix of these two perspectives:

First, if two descriptions give the same results, then do the descriptions matter? As physicists, we have a history of treating theories as the same if they make the same predictions. Space-time itself is a result of this policy: in the theory of relativity, two people might disagree on which one of two events happened first or second, but they will agree on the overall distance in space-time between the two. From this perspective, a duality between a bulk theory and a boundary theory isn’t evidence that the bulk theory emerges from the boundary, but it is evidence that both the bulk and boundary theories should be replaced by an “overall theory”, one that treats bulk and boundary as irrelevant descriptions of the same physical reality. This perspective is similar to an old philosophical theory called positivism: that statements are meaningless if they cannot be derived from something measurable. That theory wasn’t very useful for philosophers, which is probably part of why some philosophers are skeptics of “space-time is doomed”. The perspective has been quite useful to physicists, though, so we’re likely to stick with it.

Second, some will say that it’s true that a dual theory is not an emergent theory…but it can be the first step to discover one. In this perspective, dualities are suggestive evidence that a deeper theory is waiting in the wings. The idea would be that one would first discover a duality, then discover situations that break that duality: examples on one side that don’t correspond to anything sensible on the other. Maybe some patterns of quantum entanglement are dual to a picture of space-time, but some are not. (Closer to my sub-field, maybe there’s an object like the amplituhedron that doesn’t respect locality or unitarity.) If you’re lucky, maybe there are situations, or even experiments, that go from one to the other: where the space-time description works until a certain point, then stops working, and only the dual description survives. Some of the models of emergent space-time people study are genuinely of this type, where a dimension emerges in a theory that previously didn’t have one. (For those of you having a hard time imagining this, read my old post about “bubbles of nothing”, then think of one happening in reverse.)

It’s premature to say space-time is doomed, at least as a definite statement. But it is looking like, one way or another, space-time won’t be the right picture for fundamental physics. Maybe that’s because it’s equivalent to another description, redundant embellishment on an essential theoretical core. Maybe instead it breaks down, and a more fundamental theory could describe more situations. We don’t know yet. But physicists are trying to figure it out.

The arXiv SciComm Challenge

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Fellow science communicators, think you can explain everything that goes on in your field? If so, I have a challenge for you. Pick a day, and go through all the new papers on arXiv.org in a single area. For each one, try to give a general-audience explanation of what the paper is about. To make it easier, you can ignore cross-listed papers. If your field doesn’t use arXiv, consider if you can do the challenge with another appropriate site.

I’ll start. I’m looking at papers in the “High Energy Physics – Theory” area, announced 6 Jan, 2022. I’ll warn you in advance that I haven’t read these papers, just their abstracts, so apologies if I get your paper wrong!

arXiv:2201.01303 : Holographic State Complexity from Group Cohomology

This paper says it is a contribution to a Proceedings. That means it is based on a talk given at a conference. In my field, a talk like this usually won’t be presenting new results, but instead summarizes results in a previous paper. So keep that in mind.

There is an idea in physics called holography, where two theories are secretly the same even though they describe the world with different numbers of dimensions. Usually this involves a gravitational theory in a “box”, and a theory without gravity that describes the sides of the box. The sides turn out to fully describe the inside of the box, much like a hologram looks 3D but can be printed on a flat sheet of paper. Using this idea, physicists have connected some properties of gravity to properties of the theory on the sides of the box. One of those properties is complexity: the complexity of the theory on the sides of the box says something about gravity inside the box, in particular about the size of wormholes. The trouble is, “complexity” is a bit subjective: it’s not clear how to give a good definition for it for this type of theory. In this paper, the author studies a theory with a precise mathematical definition, called a topological theory. This theory turns out to have mathematical properties that suggest a well-defined notion of complexity for it.

arXiv:2201.01393 : Nonrelativistic effective field theories with enhanced symmetries and soft behavior

We sometimes describe quantum field theory as quantum mechanics plus relativity. That’s not quite true though, because it is possible to define a quantum field theory that doesn’t obey special relativity, a non-relativistic theory. Physicists do this if they want to describe a system moving much slower than the speed of light: it gets used sometimes for nuclear physics, and sometimes for modeling colliding black holes.

In particle physics, a “soft” particle is one with almost no momentum. We can classify theories based on how they behave when a particle becomes more and more soft. In normal quantum field theories, if they have special behavior when a particle becomes soft it’s often due to a symmetry of the theory, where the theory looks the same even if something changes. This paper shows that this is not true for non-relativistic theories: they have more requirements to have special soft behavior, not just symmetry. They “bootstrap” a few theories, using some general restrictions to find them without first knowing how they work (“pulling them up by their own bootstraps”), and show that the theories they find are in a certain sense unique, the only theories of that kind.

arXiv:2201.01552 : Transmutation operators and expansions for 1-loop Feynman integrands

In recent years, physicists in my sub-field have found new ways to calculate the probability that particles collide. One of these methods describes ordinary particles in a way resembling string theory, and from this discovered a whole “web” of theories that were linked together by small modifications of the method. This method originally worked only for the simplest Feynman diagrams, the “tree” diagrams that correspond to classical physics, but was extended to the next-simplest diagrams, diagrams with one “loop” that start incorporating quantum effects.

This paper concerns a particular spinoff of this method, that can find relationships between certain one-loop calculations in a particularly efficient way. It lets you express calculations of particle collisions in a variety of theories in terms of collisions in a very simple theory. Unlike the original method, it doesn’t rely on any particular picture of how these collisions work, either Feynman diagrams or strings.

arXiv:2201.01624 : Moduli and Hidden Matter in Heterotic M-Theory with an Anomalous U(1) Hidden Sector

In string theory (and its more sophisticated cousin M theory), our four-dimensional world is described as a world with more dimensions, where the extra dimensions are twisted up so that they cannot be detected. The shape of the extra dimensions influences the kinds of particles we can observe in our world. That shape is described by variables called “moduli”. If those moduli are stable, then the properties of particles we observe would be fixed, otherwise they would not be. In general it is a challenge in string theory to stabilize these moduli and get a world like what we observe.

This paper discusses shapes that give rise to a “hidden sector”, a set of particles that are disconnected from the particles we know so that they are hard to observe. Such particles are often proposed as a possible explanation for dark matter. This paper calculates, for a particular kind of shape, what the masses of different particles are, as well as how different kinds of particles can decay into each other. For example, a particle that causes inflation (the accelerating expansion of the universe) can decay into effects on the moduli and dark matter. The paper also shows how some of the moduli are made stable in this picture.

arXiv:2201.01630 : Chaos in Celestial CFT

One variant of the holography idea I mentioned earlier is called “celestial” holography. In this picture, the sides of the box are an infinite distance away: a “celestial sphere” depicting the angles particles go after they collide, in the same way a star chart depicts the angles between stars. Recent work has shown that there is something like a sensible theory that describes physics on this celestial sphere, that contains all the information about what happens inside.

This paper shows that the celestial theory has a property called quantum chaos. In physics, a theory is said to be chaotic if it depends very precisely on its initial conditions, so that even a small change will result in a large change later (the usual metaphor is a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane). This kind of behavior appears to be present in this theory.

arXiv:2201.01657 : Calculations of Delbrück scattering to all orders in αZ

Delbrück scattering is an effect where the nuclei of heavy elements like lead can deflect high-energy photons, as a consequence of quantum field theory. This effect is apparently tricky to calculate, and previous calculations have involved approximations. This paper finds a way to calculate the effect without those approximations, which should let it match better with experiments.

(As an aside, I’m a little confused by the claim that they’re going to all orders in αZ when it looks like they just consider one-loop diagrams…but this is probably just my ignorance, this is a corner of the field quite distant from my own.)

arXiv:2201.01674 : On Unfolded Approach To Off-Shell Supersymmetric Models

Supersymmetry is a relationship between two types of particles: fermions, which typically make up matter, and bosons, which are usually associated with forces. In realistic theories this relationship is “broken” and the two types of particles have different properties, but theoretical physicists often study models where supersymmetry is “unbroken” and the two types of particles have the same mass and charge. This paper finds a new way of describing some theories of this kind that reorganizes them in an interesting way, using an “unfolded” approach in which aspects of the particles that would normally be combined are given their own separate variables.

(This is another one I don’t know much about, this is the first time I’d heard of the unfolded approach.)

arXiv:2201.01679 : Geometric Flow of Bubbles

String theorists have conjectured that only some types of theories can be consistently combined with a full theory of quantum gravity, others live in a “swampland” of non-viable theories. One set of conjectures characterizes this swampland in terms of “flows” in which theories with different geometry can flow in to each other. The properties of these flows are supposed to be related to which theories are or are not in the swampland.

This paper writes down equations describing these flows, and applies them to some toy model “bubble” universes.

arXiv:2201.01697 : Graviton scattering amplitudes in first quantisation

This paper is a pedagogical one, introducing graduate students to a topic rather than presenting new research.

Usually in quantum field theory we do something called “second quantization”, thinking about the world not in terms of particles but in terms of fields that fill all of space and time. However, sometimes one can instead use “first quantization”, which is much more similar to ordinary quantum mechanics. There you think of a single particle traveling along a “world-line”, and calculate the probability it interacts with other particles in particular ways. This approach has recently been used to calculate interactions of gravitons, particles related to the gravitational field in the same way photons are related to the electromagnetic field. The approach has some advantages in terms of simplifying the results, which are described in this paper.

Stop Listing the Amplituhedron as a Competitor of String Theory

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The Economist recently had an article (paywalled) that meandered through various developments in high-energy physics. It started out talking about the failure of the LHC to find SUSY, argued this looked bad for string theory (which…not really?) and used it as a jumping-off point to talk about various non-string “theories of everything”. Peter Woit quoted it a few posts back as kind of a bellwether for public opinion on supersymmetry and string theory.

The article was a muddle, but a fairly conventional muddle, explaining or mis-explaining things in roughly the same way as other popular physics pieces. For the most part that didn’t bug me, but one piece of the muddle hit a bit close to home:

The names of many of these [non-string theories of everything] do, it must be conceded, torture the English language. They include “causal dynamical triangulation”, “asymptotically safe gravity”, “loop quantum gravity” and the “amplituhedron formulation of quantum theory”.

I’ve posted about the amplituhedron more than a few times here on this blog. Out of every achievement of my sub-field, it has most captured the public imagination. It’s legitimately impressive, a way to translate calculations of probabilities of collisions of fundamental particles (in a toy model, to be clear) into geometrical objects. What it isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be, is a theory of everything.

To be fair, the Economist piece admits this:

Most attempts at a theory of everything try to fit gravity, which Einstein describes geometrically, into quantum theory, which does not rely on geometry in this way. The amplituhedron approach does the opposite, by suggesting that quantum theory is actually deeply geometric after all. Better yet, the amplituhedron is not founded on notions of spacetime, or even statistical mechanics. Instead, these ideas emerge naturally from it. So, while the amplituhedron approach does not as yet offer a full theory of quantum gravity, it has opened up an intriguing path that may lead to one.

The reasoning they have leading up to it has a few misunderstandings anyway. The amplituhedron is geometrical, but in a completely different way from how Einstein’s theory of gravity is geometrical: Einstein’s gravity is a theory of space and time, the amplituhedron’s magic is that it hides space and time behind a seemingly more fundamental mathematics.

This is not to say that the amplituhedron won’t lead to insights about gravity. That’s a big part of what it’s for, in the long-term. Because the amplituhedron hides the role of space and time, it might show the way to theories that lack them altogether, theories where space and time are just an approximation for a more fundamental reality. That’s a real possibility, though not at this point a reality.

Even if you take this possibility completely seriously, though, there’s another problem with the Economist’s description: it’s not clear that this new theory would be a non-string theory!

The main people behind the amplituhedron are pretty positively disposed to string theory. If you asked them, I think they’d tell you that, rather than replacing string theory, they expect to learn more about string theory: to see how it could be reformulated in a way that yields insight about trickier problems. That’s not at all like the other “non-string theories of everything” in that list, which frame themselves as alternatives to, or even opponents of, string theory.

It is a lot like several other research programs, though, like ER=EPR and It from Qubit. Researchers in those programs try to use physical principles and toy models to say fundamental things about quantum gravity, trying to think about space and time as being made up of entangled quantum objects. By that logic, they belong in that list in the article alongside the amplituhedron. The reason they aren’t is obvious if you know where they come from: ER=EPR and It from Qubit are worked on by string theorists, including some of the most prominent ones.

The thing is, any reason to put the amplituhedron on that list is also a reason to put them. The amplituhedron is not a theory of everything, it is not at present a theory of quantum gravity. It’s a research direction that might shed new insight about quantum gravity. It doesn’t explicitly involve strings, but neither does It from Qubit most of the time. Unless you’re going to describe It from Qubit as a “non-string theory of everything”, you really shouldn’t describe the amplituhedron as one.

The amplituhedron is a really cool idea, one with great potential. It’s not something like loop quantum gravity, or causal dynamical triangulations, and it doesn’t need to be. Let it be what it is, please!

Amplitudes 2021 Retrospective

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Phew!

The conference photo

Now that I’ve rested up after this year’s Amplitudes, I’ll give a few of my impressions.

Overall, I think the conference went pretty well. People seemed amused by the digital Niels Bohr, even if he looked a bit like a puppet (Lance compared him to Yoda in his final speech, which was…apt). We used Gather.town, originally just for the poster session and a “virtual reception”, but later we also encouraged people to meet up in it during breaks. That in particular was a big hit: I think people really liked the ability to just move around and chat in impromptu groups, and while nobody seemed to use the “virtual bar”, the “virtual beach” had a lively crowd. Time zones were inevitably rough, but I think we ended up with a good compromise where everyone could still see a meaningful chunk of the conference.

A few things didn’t work as well. For those planning conferences, I would strongly suggest not making a brand new gmail account to send out conference announcements: for a lot of people the emails went straight to spam. Zulip was a bust: I’m not sure if people found it more confusing than last year’s Slack or didn’t notice it due to the spam issue, but almost no-one posted in it. YouTube was complicated: the stream went down a few times and I could never figure out exactly why, it may have just been internet issues here at the Niels Bohr Institute (we did have a power outage one night and had to scramble to get internet access back the next morning). As far as I could tell YouTube wouldn’t let me re-open the previous stream so each time I had to post a new link, which probably was frustrating for those following along there.

That said, this was less of a problem than it might have been, because attendance/”viewership” as a whole was lower than expected. Zoomplitudes last year had massive numbers of people join in both on Zoom and via YouTube. We had a lot fewer: out of over 500 registered participants, we had fewer than 200 on Zoom at any one time, and at most 30 or so on YouTube. Confusion around the conference email might have played a role here, but I suspect part of the difference is simple fatigue: after over a year of this pandemic, online conferences no longer feel like an exciting new experience.

The actual content of the conference ranged pretty widely. Some people reviewed earlier work, others presented recent papers or even work-in-progress. As in recent years, a meaningful chunk of the conference focused on applications of amplitudes techniques to gravitational wave physics. This included a talk by Thibault Damour, who has by now mostly made his peace with the field after his early doubts were sorted out. He still suspected that the mismatch of scales (weak coupling on the one hand, classical scattering on the other) would cause problems in future, but after his work with Laporta and Mastrolia even he had to acknowledge that amplitudes techniques were useful.

In the past I would have put the double-copy and gravitational wave researchers under the same heading, but this year they were quite distinct. While a few of the gravitational wave talks mentioned the double-copy, most of those who brought it up were doing something quite a bit more abstract than gravitational wave physics. Indeed, several people were pushing the boundaries of what it means to double-copy. There were modified KLT kernels, different versions of color-kinematics duality, and explorations of what kinds of massive particles can and (arguably more interestingly) cannot be compatible with a double-copy framework. The sheer range of different generalizations had me briefly wondering whether the double-copy could be “too flexible to be meaningful”, whether the right definitions would let you double-copy anything out of anything. I was reassured by the points where each talk argued that certain things didn’t work: it suggests that wherever this mysterious structure comes from, its powers are limited enough to make it meaningful.

A fair number of talks dealt with what has always been our main application, collider physics. There the context shifted, but the message stayed consistent: for a “clean” enough process two or three-loop calculations can make a big difference, taking a prediction that would be completely off from experiment and bringing it into line. These are more useful the more that can be varied about the calculation: functions are more useful than numbers, for example. I was gratified to hear confirmation that a particular kind of process, where two massless particles like quarks become three massive particles like W or Z bosons, is one of these “clean enough” examples: it means someone will need to compute my “tardigrade” diagram eventually.

If collider physics is our main application, N=4 super Yang-Mills has always been our main toy model. Jaroslav Trnka gave us the details behind Nima’s exciting talk from last year, and Nima had a whole new exciting talk this year with promised connections to category theory (connections he didn’t quite reach after speaking for two and a half hours). Anastasia Volovich presented two distinct methods for predicting square-root symbol letters, while my colleague Chi Zhang showed some exciting progress with the elliptic double-box, realizing the several-year dream of representing it in a useful basis of integrals and showcasing several interesting properties. Anne Spiering came over from the integrability side to show us just how special the “planar” version of the theory really is: by increasing the number of colors of gluons, she showed that one could smoothly go between an “integrability-esque” spectrum and a “chaotic” spectrum. Finally, Lance Dixon mentioned his progress with form-factors in his talk at the end of the conference, showing off some statistics of coefficients of different functions and speculating that machine learning might be able to predict them.

On the more mathematical side, Francis Brown showed us a new way to get numbers out of graphs, one distinct but related to our usual interpretation in terms of Feynman diagrams. I’m still unsure what it will be used for, but the fact that it maps every graph to something finite probably has some interesting implications. Albrecht Klemm and Claude Duhr talked about two sides of the same story, their recent work on integrals involving Calabi-Yau manifolds. They focused on a particular nice set of integrals, and time will tell whether the methods work more broadly, but there are some exciting suggestions that at least parts will.

There’s been a resurgence of the old dream of the S-matrix community, constraining amplitudes via “general constraints” alone, and several talks dealt with those ideas. Sebastian Mizera went the other direction, and tried to test one of those “general constraints”, seeing under which circumstances he could prove that you can swap a particle going in with an antiparticle going out. Others went out to infinity, trying to understand amplitudes from the perspective of the so-called “celestial sphere” where they appear to be governed by conformal field theories of some sort. A few talks dealt with amplitudes in string theory itself: Yvonne Geyer built them out of field-theory amplitudes, while Ashoke Sen explained how to include D-instantons in them.

We also had three “special talks” in the evenings. I’ve mentioned Nima’s already. Zvi Bern gave a retrospective talk that I somewhat cheesily describe as “good for the soul”: a look to the early days of the field that reminded us of why we are who we are. Lance Dixon closed the conference with a light-hearted summary and a look to the future. That future includes next year’s Amplitudes, which after a hasty discussion during this year’s conference has now localized to Prague. Let’s hope it’s in person!

Black Holes, Neutron Stars, and the Power of Love

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What’s the difference between a black hole and a neutron star?

When a massive star nears the end of its life, it starts running out of nuclear fuel. Without the support of a continuous explosion, the star begins to collapse, crushed under its own weight.

What happens then depends on how much weight that is. The most massive stars collapse completely, into the densest form anything can take: a black hole. Einstein’s equations say a black hole is a single point, infinitely dense: get close enough and nothing, not even light, can escape. A quantum theory of gravity would change this, but not a lot: a quantum black hole would still be as dense as quantum matter can get, still equipped with a similar “point of no return”.

A slightly less massive star collapses, not to a black hole, but to a neutron star. Matter in a neutron star doesn’t collapse to a single point, but it does change dramatically. Each electron in the old star is crushed together with a proton until it becomes a neutron, a forced reversal of the more familiar process of Beta decay. Instead of a ball of hydrogen and helium, the star then ends up like a single atomic nucleus, one roughly the size of a city.

Not kidding about the “city” thing…and remember, this is more massive than the Sun

Now, let me ask a slightly different question: how do you tell the difference between a black hole and a neutron star?

Sometimes, you can tell this through ordinary astronomy. Neutron stars do emit light, unlike black holes, though for most neutron stars this is hard to detect. In the past, astronomers would use other objects instead, looking at light from matter falling in, orbiting, or passing by a black hole or neutron star to estimate its mass and size.

Now they have another tool: gravitational wave telescopes. Maybe you’ve heard of LIGO, or its European cousin Virgo: massive machines that do astronomy not with light but by detecting ripples in space and time. In the future, these will be joined by an even bigger setup in space, called LISA. When two black holes or neutron stars collide they “ring” the fabric of space and time like a bell, sending out waves in every direction. By analyzing the frequency of these waves, scientists can learn something about what made them: in particular, whether the waves were made by black holes or neutron stars.

One big difference between black holes and neutron stars lies in something called their “Love numbers“. From far enough away, you can pretend both black holes and neutron stars are single points, like fundamental particles. Try to get more precise, and this picture starts to fail, but if you’re smart you can include small corrections and keep things working. Some of those corrections, called Love numbers, measure how much one object gets squeezed and stretched by the other’s gravitational field. They’re called Love numbers not because they measure how hug-able a neutron star is, but after the mathematician who first proposed them, A. E. H. Love.

What can we learn from Love numbers? Quite a lot. More impressively, there are several different types of questions Love numbers can answer. There are questions about our theories, questions about the natural world, and questions about fundamental physics.

You might have heard that black holes “have no hair”. A black hole in space can be described by just two numbers: its mass, and how much it spins. A star is much more complicated, with sunspots and solar flares and layers of different gases in different amounts. For a black hole, all of that is compressed down to nothing, reduced to just those two numbers and nothing else.

With that in mind, you might think a black hole should have zero Love numbers: it should be impossible to squeeze it or stretch it. This is fundamentally a question about a theory, Einstein’s theory of relativity. If we took that theory for granted, and didn’t add anything to it, what would the consequences be? Would black holes have zero Love number, or not?

It turns out black holes do have zero Love number, if they aren’t spinning. If they are, things are more complicated: a few calculations made it look like spinning black holes also had zero Love number, but just last year a more detailed proof showed that this doesn’t hold. Somehow, despite having “no hair”, you can actually “squeeze” a spinning black hole.

(EDIT: Folks on twitter pointed out a wrinkle here: more recent papers are arguing that spinning black holes actually do have zero Love number as well, and that the earlier papers confused Love numbers with a different effect. All that is to say this is still very much an active area of research!)

The physics behind neutron stars is in principle known, but in practice hard to understand. When they are formed, almost every type of physics gets involved: gas and dust, neutrino blasts, nuclear physics, and general relativity holding it all together.

Because of all this complexity, the structure of neutron stars can’t be calculated from “first principles” alone. Finding it out isn’t a question about our theories, but a question about the natural world. We need to go out and measure how neutron stars actually behave.

Love numbers are a promising way to do that. Love numbers tell you how an object gets squeezed and stretched in a gravitational field. Learning the Love numbers of neutron stars will tell us something about their structure: namely, how squeezable and stretchable they are. Already, LIGO and Virgo have given us some information about this, and ruled out a few possibilities. In future, the LISA telescope will show much more.

Returning to black holes, you might wonder what happens if we don’t stick to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Physicists expect that relativity has to be modified to account for quantum effects, to make a true theory of quantum gravity. We don’t quite know how to do that yet, but there are a few proposals on the table.

Asking for the true theory of quantum gravity isn’t just a question about some specific part of the natural world, it’s a question about the fundamental laws of physics. Can Love numbers help us answer it?

Maybe. Some theorists think that quantum gravity will change the Love numbers of black holes. Fewer, but still some, think they will change enough to be detectable, with future gravitational wave telescopes like LISA. I get the impression this is controversial, both because of the different proposals involved and the approximations used to understand them. Still, it’s fun that Love numbers can answer so many different types of questions, and teach us so many different things about physics.

Unrelated: For those curious about what I look/sound like, I recently gave a talk of outreach advice for the Max Planck Institute for Physics, and they posted it online here.

QCD Meets Gravity 2020, Retrospective

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I was at a Zoomference last week, called QCD Meets Gravity, about the many ways gravity can be thought of as the “square” of other fundamental forces. I didn’t have time to write much about the actual content of the conference, so I figured I’d say a bit more this week.

A big theme of this conference, as in the past few years, was gravitational waves. From LIGO’s first announcement of a successful detection, amplitudeologists have been developing new methods to make predictions for gravitational waves more efficient. It’s a field I’ve dabbled in a bit myself. Last year’s QCD Meets Gravity left me impressed by how much progress had been made, with amplitudeologists already solidly part of the conversation and able to produce competitive results. This year felt like another milestone, in that the amplitudeologists weren’t just catching up with other gravitational wave researchers on the same kinds of problems. Instead, they found new questions that amplitudes are especially well-suited to answer. These included combining two pieces of these calculations (“potential” and “radiation”) that the older community typically has to calculate separately, using an old quantum field theory trick, finding the gravitational wave directly from amplitudes, and finding a few nice calculations that can be used to “generate” the rest.

A large chunk of the talks focused on different “squaring” tricks (or as we actually call them, double-copies). There were double-copies for cosmology and conformal field theory, for the celestial sphere, and even some version of M theory. There were new perspectives on the double-copy, new building blocks and algebraic structures that lie behind it. There were talks on the so-called classical double-copy for space-times, where there have been some strange discoveries (an extra dimension made an appearance) but also a more rigorous picture of where the whole thing comes from, using twistor space. There were not one, but two talks linking the double-copy to the Navier-Stokes equation describing fluids, from two different groups. (I’m really curious whether these perspectives are actually useful for practical calculations about fluids, or just fun to think about.) Finally, while there wasn’t a talk scheduled on this paper, the authors were roped in by popular demand to talk about their work. They claim to have made progress on a longstanding puzzle, how to show that double-copy works at the level of the Lagrangian, and the community was eager to dig into the details.

From there, a grab-bag of talks covered other advancements. There were talks from string theorists and ambitwistor string theorists, from Effective Field Theorists working on gravity and the Standard Model, from calculations in N=4 super Yang-Mills, QCD, and scalar theories. Simon Caron-Huot delved into how causality constrains the theories we can write down, showing an interesting case where the common assumption that all parameters are close to one is actually justified. Nima Arkani-Hamed began his talk by saying he’d surprise us, which he certainly did (and not by keeping on time). It’s tricky to explain why his talk was exciting. Comparing to his earlier discovery of the Amplituhedron, which worked for a toy model, this is a toy calculation in a toy model. While the Amplituhedron wasn’t based on Feynman diagrams, this can’t even be compared with Feynman diagrams. Instead of expanding in a small coupling constant, this expands in a parameter that by all rights should be equal to one. And instead of positivity conditions, there are negativity conditions. All I can say is that with all of that in mind, it looks like real progress on an important and difficult problem from a totally unanticipated direction. In a speech summing up the conference, Zvi Bern mentioned a few exciting words from Nima’s talk: “nonplanar”, “integrated”, “nonperturbative”. I’d add “differential equations” and “infinite sums of ladder diagrams”. Nima and collaborators are trying to figure out what happens when you sum up all of the Feynman diagrams in a theory. I’ve made progress in the past for diagrams with one “direction”, a ladder that grows as you add more loops, but I didn’t know how to add “another direction” to the ladder. In very rough terms, Nima and collaborators figured out how to add that direction.

I’ve probably left things out here, it was a packed conference! It’s been really fun seeing what the community has cooked up, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

QCD Meets Gravity 2020

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I’m at another Zoom conference this week, QCD Meets Gravity. This year it’s hosted by Northwestern.

The view of the campus from wonder.me

QCD Meets Gravity is a conference series focused on the often-surprising links between quantum chromodynamics on the one hand and gravity on the other. By thinking of gravity as the “square” of forces like the strong nuclear force, researchers have unlocked new calculation techniques and deep insights.

Last year’s conference was very focused on one particular topic, trying to predict the gravitational waves observed by LIGO and VIRGO. That’s still a core topic of the conference, but it feels like there is a bit more diversity in topics this year. We’ve seen a variety of talks on different “squares”: new theories that square to other theories, and new calculations that benefit from “squaring” (even surprising applications to the Navier-Stokes equation!) There are talks on subjects from String Theory to Effective Field Theory, and even a talk on a very different way that “QCD meets gravity”, in collisions of neutron stars.

With still a few more talks to go, expect me to say a bit more next week, probably discussing a few in more detail. (Several people presented exciting work in progress!) Until then, I should get back to watching!

Discovering the Rules, Discovering the Consequences

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Two big physics experiments consistently make the news. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. One collides protons, the other watches colliding black holes and neutron stars. But while this may make the experiments sound quite similar, their goals couldn’t be more different.

The goal of the LHC, put simply, is to discover the rules that govern reality. Should the LHC find a new fundamental particle, it will tell us something we didn’t know about the laws of physics, a newly discovered fact that holds true everywhere in the universe. So far, it has discovered the Higgs boson, and while that particular rule was expected we didn’t know the details until they were tested. Now physicists hope to find something more, a deviation from the Standard Model that hints at a new law of nature altogether.

LIGO, in contrast, isn’t really for discovering the rules of the universe. Instead, it discovers the consequences of those rules, on a grand scale. Even if we knew the laws of physics completely, we can’t calculate everything from those first principles. We can simulate some things, and approximate others, but we need experiments to tweak those simulations and test those approximations. LIGO fills that role. We can try to estimate how common black holes are, and how large, but LIGO’s results were still a surprise, suggesting medium-sized black holes are more common than researchers expected. In the future, gravitational wave telescopes might discover more of these kinds of consequences, from the shape of neutron stars to the aftermath of cosmic inflation.

There are a few exceptions for both experiments. The LHC can also discover the consequences of the laws of physics, especially when those consequences are very difficult to calculate, finding complicated arrangements of known particles, like pentaquarks and glueballs. And it’s possible, though perhaps not likely, that LIGO could discover something about quantum gravity. Quantum gravity’s effects are expected to be so small that these experiments won’t see them, but some have speculated that an unusually large effect could be detected by a gravitational wave telescope.

As scientists, we want to know everything we can about everything we find. We want to know the basic laws that govern the universe, but we also want to know the consequences of those laws, the story of how our particular universe came to be the way it is today. And luckily, we have experiments for both.