Tag Archives: supersymmetry

Rooting out the Answer

I have a new paper out today, with Jacob Bourjaily, Andrew McLeod, Matthias Wilhelm, Cristian Vergu and Matthias Volk.

There’s a story I’ve told before on this blog, about a kind of “alphabet” for particle physics predictions. When we try to make a prediction in particle physics, we need to do complicated integrals. Sometimes, these integrals simplify dramatically, in unexpected ways. It turns out we can understand these simplifications by writing the integrals in a sort of “alphabet”, breaking complicated mathematical “periods” into familiar logarithms. If we want to simplify an integral, we can use relations between logarithms like these:

$\log(a b)=\log(a)+\log(b),\quad \log(a^n)=n\log(a)$

to factor our “alphabet” into pieces as simple as possible.

The simpler the alphabet, the more progress you can make. And in the nice toy model theory we’re working with, the alphabets so far have been simple in one key way. Expressed in the right variables, they’re rational. For example, they contain no square roots.

Would that keep going? Would we keep finding rational alphabets? Or might the alphabets, instead, have square roots?

After some searching, we found a clean test case. There was a calculation we could do with just two Feynman diagrams. All we had to do was subtract one from the other. If they still had square roots in their alphabet, we’d have proven that the nice, rational alphabets eventually had to stop.

So we calculated these diagrams, doing the complicated integrals. And we found they did indeed have square roots in their alphabet, in fact many more than expected. They even had square roots of square roots!

You’d think that would be the end of the story. But square roots are trickier than you’d expect.

Remember that to simplify these integrals, we break them up into an alphabet, and factor the alphabet. What happens when we try to do that with an alphabet that has square roots?

Suppose we have letters in our alphabet with $\sqrt{-5}$ . Suppose another letter is the number 9. You might want to factor it like this:

$9=3\times 3$

Simple, right? But what if instead you did this:

$9=(2+ \sqrt{-5} )\times(2- \sqrt{-5} )$

Once you allow $\sqrt{-5}$ in the game, you can factor 9 in two different ways. The central assumption, that you can always just factor your alphabet, breaks down. In mathematical terms, you no longer have a unique factorization domain.

Instead, we had to get a lot more mathematically sophisticated, factoring into something called prime ideals. We got that working and started crunching through the square roots in our alphabet. Things simplified beautifully: we started with a result that was ten million terms long, and reduced it to just five thousand. And at the end of the day, after subtracting one integral from the other…

We found no square roots!

After all of our simplifications, all the letters we found were rational. Our nice test case turned out much, much simpler than we expected.

It’s been a long road on this calculation, with a lot of false starts. We were kind of hoping to be the first to find square root letters in these alphabets; instead it looks like another group will beat us to the punch. But we developed a lot of interesting tricks along the way, and we thought it would be good to publish our “null result”. As always in our field, sometimes surprising simplifications are just around the corner.

Breakthrough Prize for Supergravity

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This week, $3 Million was awarded by the Breakthrough Prize to Sergio Ferrara, Daniel Z. Freedman and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, the discoverers of the theory of supergravity, part of a special award separate from their yearly Fundamental Physics Prize. There’s a nice interview with Peter van Nieuwenhuizen on the Stony Brook University website, about his reaction to the award.

The Breakthrough Prize was designed to complement the Nobel Prize, rewarding deserving researchers who wouldn’t otherwise get the Nobel. The Nobel Prize is only awarded to theoretical physicists when they predict something that is later observed in an experiment. Many theorists are instead renowned for their mathematical inventions, concepts that other theorists build on and use but that do not by themselves make testable predictions. The Breakthrough Prize celebrates these theorists, and while it has also been awarded to others who the Nobel committee could not or did not recognize (various large experimental collaborations, Jocelyn Bell Burnell), this has always been the physics prize’s primary focus.

The Breakthrough Prize website describes supergravity as a theory that combines gravity with particle physics. That’s a bit misleading: while the theory does treat gravity in a “particle physics” way, unlike string theory it doesn’t solve the famous problems with combining quantum mechanics and gravity. (At least, as far as we know.)

It’s better to say that supergravity is a theory that links gravity to other parts of particle physics, via supersymmetry. Supersymmetry is a relationship between two types of particles: bosons, like photons, gravitons, or the Higgs, and fermions, like electrons or quarks. In supersymmetry, each type of boson has a fermion “partner”, and vice versa. In supergravity, gravity itself gets a partner, called the gravitino. Supersymmetry links the properties of particles and their partners together: both must have the same mass and the same charge. In a sense, it can unify different types of particles, explaining both under the same set of rules.

In the real world, we don’t see bosons and fermions with the same mass and charge. If gravitinos exist, then supersymmetry would have to be “broken”, giving them a high mass that makes them hard to find. Some hoped that the Large Hadron Collider could find these particles, but now it looks like it won’t, so there is no evidence for supergravity at the moment.

Instead, supergravity’s success has been as a tool to understand other theories of gravity. When the theory was proposed in the 1970’s, it was thought of as a rival to string theory. Instead, over the years it consistently managed to point out aspects of string theory that the string theorists themselves had missed, for example noticing that the theory needed not just strings but higher-dimensional objects called “branes”. Now, supergravity is understood as one part of a broader string theory picture.

In my corner of physics, we try to find shortcuts for complicated calculations. We benefit a lot from toy models: simpler, unrealistic theories that let us test our ideas before applying them to the real world. Supergravity is one of the best toy models we’ve got, a theory that makes gravity simple enough that we can start to make progress. Right now, colleagues of mine are developing new techniques for calculations at LIGO, the gravitational wave telescope. If they hadn’t worked with supergravity first, they would never have discovered these techniques.

The discovery of supergravity by Ferrara, Freedman, and van Nieuwenhuizen is exactly the kind of work the Breakthrough Prize was created to reward. Supergravity is a theory with deep mathematics, rich structure, and wide applicability. There is of course no guarantee that such a theory describes the real world. What is guaranteed, though, is that someone will find it useful.

Strings 2018

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I’m at Strings this week, in tropical Okinawa. Opening the conference, organizer Hirosi Ooguri joked that they had carefully scheduled things for a sunny time of year, and since the rainy season had just ended “who says that string theorists don’t make predictions?”

There was then a rainstorm during lunch, falsifying string theory

This is the first time I’ve been to Strings. There are almost 500 people here, which might seem small for folks in other fields, but for me this is the biggest conference I’ve attended. The size is noticeable in the little things: this is the first conference I’ve been to with a diaper changing room, the first managed by a tour company, the first with a dedicated “Cultural Evening” featuring classical music from the region. With this in mind, the conference were impressively well-organized, but there were some substantial gaps (tightly packed tours before the Cultural Evening that didn’t leave time for dinner, and a talk by Morrison cut short by missing slides that offset the schedule of the whole last day).

On the well-organized side, Strings has a particular structure for its talks, with Review Talks and Plenary Talks. The Review Talks each summarize a subject: mostly main focuses of the conference, but with a few (Ashoke Sen on String Field Theory, David Simmons-Duffin on the Conformal Bootstrap) that only covered the content of a few talks.

I’m not going to make another pie chart this year, if you want that kind of breakdown Daniel Harlow gave one during the “Golden Jubilee” at the end. If I did something like that this time, I’d divide it up not by sub-fields, but by goals. Talks here focused on a few big questions: “Can we classify all quantum field theories?” “What are the general principles behind quantum gravity?” “Can we make some of the murky aspects of string theory clearer?” “How can string theory give rise to sensible physics in four dimensions?”

Of those questions, classifying quantum field theories made up the bulk of the conference. I’ve heard people dismiss this work on the ground that much of it only works in supersymmetric theories. With that in mind, it was remarkable just how much of the conference was non-supersymmetric. Supersymmetry still played a role, but the assumption seemed to be that it was more of a sub-topic than something universal (to the extent that one of the Review Talks, Clay Cordova’s “What’s new with Q?”, was “the supersymmetry review talk”). Both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric theories are increasingly understood as being part of a “landscape”, linked by duality and thinking at different scales. These links are sometimes understood in terms of string theory, but often not. So far it’s not clear if there is a real organizing principle here, especially for the non-supersymmetric cases, and people seem to be kept busy enough just proving the links they observe.

Finding general principles behind quantum gravity motivated a decent range of the talks, from Andrew Strominger to Jorge Santos. The topics that got the most focus, and two of the Review Talks, were by what I’ve referred to as “entanglers”, people investigating the structure of space and time via quantum entanglement and entropy. My main takeaway from these talks was perhaps a bit frivolous: between Maldacena’s talk (about an extremely small wormhole made from Standard Model-compatible building blocks) and Hartman’s discussion of the Average Null Energy Condition, it looks like a “useful sci-fi wormhole” (specifically, one that gets you there faster than going the normal way) has been conclusively ruled out in quantum field theory.

Only a minority of talks discussed using string theory to describe the real world, though I get the impression this was still more focus than in past years. In particular, there were several talks trying to discover properties of Calabi-Yaus, the geometries used to curl up string theory’s extra dimensions. Watching these talks I had a similar worry to Strominger’s question after Irene Valenzuela’s talk: it’s not clear that these investigations aren’t just examining a small range of possibilities, one that might become irrelevant if new dualities or types of compactification are found. Ironically, this objection seems to apply least to Valenzuela’s talk itself: characterizing the “swampland” of theories that don’t make sense as part of a theory of quantum gravity may start with examples from string compactifications, but its practitioners are looking for more general principles about quantum gravity and seem to manage at least reasonable arguments that don’t depend on string theory being true.

There wasn’t much from the amplitudes field at this conference, with just Yu-tin Huang’s talk carrying that particular flag. Despite that, amplitudes methods came up in several talks, with Silviu Pufu praising an amplitudes textbook and David Simmons-Duffin bringing up amplitudes several times (more than he did in his talk last week at Amplitudes).

The end of the conference featured a panel discussion in honor of String Theory’s 50th Anniversary, its “Golden Jubilee”. The panel was evenly split between founders of string theory, heroes of the string duality revolution, and the current crop of young theorists. The panelists started by each giving a short presentation. Michael Green joked that it felt like a “geriatric gong show”, and indeed a few of the presentations were gong show-esque. Still, some of the speeches were inspiring. I was particularly impressed by Juan Maldacena, Eva Silverstein, and Daniel Harlow, who each laid out a compelling direction for string theory’s future. The questions afterwards were collated by David Gross from audience submissions, and were largely what you would expect, with quite a lot of questions about whether string theory can ever connect with experiment. I was more than a little disappointed by the discussion of whether string theory can give rise to de Sitter space, which was rather botched: Maldacena was appointed as the defender of de Sitter, but (contra Gross’s summary) the quantum complexity-based derivation he proposed didn’t sound much like the flux compactifications that have inspired so much controversy, so everyone involved ended up talking past each other.

Edit: See Shamit’s comment below, I apparently misunderstood what Maldacena was referring to.

The State of Four Gravitons

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This blog is named for a question: does the four-graviton amplitude in N=8 supergravity diverge?

Over the years, Zvi Bern and a growing cast of collaborators have been trying to answer that question. They worked their way up, loop by loop, until they stalled at five loops. Last year, they finally broke the stall, and last week, they published the result of the five-loop calculation. They find that N=8 supergravity does not diverge at five loops in four dimensions, but does diverge in 24/5 dimensions. I thought I’d write a brief FAQ about the status so far.

Q: Wait a minute, 24/5 dimensions? What does that mean? Are you talking about fractals, or…

Nothing so exotic. The number 24/5 comes from a regularization trick. When we’re calculating an amplitude that might be divergent, one way to deal with it is to treat the dimension like a free variable. You can then see what happens as you vary the dimension, and see when the amplitude starts diverging. If the dimension is an integer, then this ends up matching a more physics-based picture, where you start with a theory in eleven dimensions and curl up the extra ones until you get to the dimension you’re looking for. For fractional dimensions, it’s not clear that there’s any physical picture like this: it’s just a way to talk about how close something is to diverging.

Q: I’m really confused. What’s a graviton? What is supergravity? What’s a divergence?

I don’t have enough space to explain these things here, but that’s why I write handbooks. Here are explanations of gravitons, supersymmetry, and (N=8) supergravity, loops, and divergences. Please let me know if anything in those explanations is unclear, or if you have any more questions.

Q: Why do people think that N=8 supergravity will diverge at seven loops?

There’s a useful rule of thumb in quantum field theory: anything that can happen, will happen. In this case, that means if there’s a way for a theory to diverge that’s consistent with the symmetries of the theory, then it almost always does diverge. In the past, that meant that people expected N=8 supergravity to diverge at five loops. However, researchers found a previously unknown symmetry that looked like it would forbid the five-loop divergence, and only allow a divergence at seven loops (in four dimensions). Zvi and co.’s calculation confirms that the five-loop divergence doesn’t show up.

More generally, string theory not only avoids divergences but clears up other phenomena, like black holes. These two things seem tied together: string theory cleans up problems in quantum gravity in a consistent, unified way. There isn’t a clear way for N=8 supergravity on its own to clean up these kinds of problems, which makes some people skeptical that it can match string theory’s advantages. Either way N=8 supergravity, unlike string theory, isn’t a candidate theory of nature by itself: it would need to be modified in order to describe our world, and no-one has suggested a way to do that.

Q: Why do people think that N=8 supergravity won’t diverge at seven loops?

There’s a useful rule of thumb in amplitudes: amplitudes are weird. In studying amplitudes we often notice unexpected simplifications, patterns that uncover new principles that weren’t obvious before.

Gravity in general seems to have a lot of these kinds of simplifications. Even without any loops, its behavior is surprisingly tame: it’s a theory that we can build up piece by piece from the three-particle interaction, even though naively we shouldn’t be able to (for the experts: I’m talking about large-z behavior in BCFW). This behavior seems to have an effect on one-loop amplitudes as well. There are other ways in which gravity seems better-behaved than expected, overall this suggests that we still have a fair ways to go before we understand all of the symmetries of gravity theories.

Supersymmetric gravity in particular also seems unusually well-behaved. N=5 supergravity was expected to diverge at four loops, but doesn’t. N=4 supergravity does diverge at four loops, but that seems to be due to an effect that is specific to that case (for the experts: an anomaly).

For N=8 specifically, a suggestive hint came from varying the dimension. If you checked the dimension in which the theory diverged at each loop, you’d find it matched the divergences of another theory, N=4 super Yang-Mills. At $l$ loops, N=4 super Yang-Mills diverges in dimension $4+6/l$ . From that formula, you can see that no matter how much you increase $l$ , you’ll never get to four dimensions: in four dimensions, N=4 super Yang-Mills doesn’t diverge.

At five loops, N=4 super Yang-Mills diverges in 26/5 dimensions. Zvi Bern made a bet with supergravity expert Kelly Stelle that the dimension would be the same for N=8 supergravity: a bottle of California wine from Bern versus English wine from Stelle. Now that they’ve found a divergence in 24/5 dimensions instead, Stelle will likely be getting his wine soon.

Q: It sounds like the calculation was pretty tough. Can they still make it to seven loops?

I think so, yes. Doing the five-loop calculation they noticed simplifications, clever tricks uncovered by even more clever grad students. The end result is that if they just want to find out whether the theory diverges then they don’t have to do the “whole calculation”, just part of it. This simplifies things a lot. They’ll probably have to find a few more simplifications to make seven loops viable, but I’m optimistic that they’ll find them, and in the meantime the new tricks should have some applications in other theories.

Q: What do you think? Will the theory diverge?

I’m not sure.

To be honest, I’m a bit less optimistic than I used to be. The agreement of divergence dimensions between N=8 supergravity and N=4 super Yang-Mills wasn’t the strongest argument (there’s a reason why, though Stelle accepted the bet on five loops, string theorist Michael Green is waiting on seven loops for his bet). Fractional dimensions don’t obviously mean anything physically, and many of the simplifications in gravity seem specific to four dimensions. Still, it was suggestive, the kind of “motivation” that gets a conjecture started.

Without that motivation, none of the remaining arguments are specific to N=8. I still think unexpected simplifications are likely, that gravity overall behaves better than we yet appreciate. I still would bet on seven loops being finite. But I’m less confident about what it would mean for the theory overall. That’s going to take more serious analysis, digging in to the anomaly in N=4 supergravity and seeing what generalizes. It does at least seem like Zvi and co. are prepared to undertake that analysis.

Regardless, it’s still worth pushing for seven loops. Having that kind of heavy-duty calculation in our sub-field forces us to improve our mathematical technology, in the same way that space programs and particle colliders drive technology in the wider world. If you think your new amplitudes method is more efficient than the alternatives, the push to seven loops is the ideal stress test. Jacob Bourjaily likes to tell me how his prescriptive unitarity technique is better than what Zvi and co. are doing, this is our chance to find out!

Overall, I still stand by what I say in my blog’s sidebar. I’m interested in N=8 supergravity, I’d love to find out whether the four-graviton amplitude diverges…and now that the calculation is once again making progress, I expect that I will.

Amplitudes Papers I Haven’t Had Time to Read

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Interesting amplitudes papers seem to come in groups. Several interesting papers went up this week, and I’ve been too busy to read any of them!

Well, that’s not quite true, I did manage to read this paper, by James Drummond, Jack Foster, and Omer Gurdogan. At six pages long, it wasn’t hard to fit in, and the result could be quite useful. The way my collaborators and I calculate amplitudes involves building up a mathematical object called a symbol, described in terms of a string of “letters”. What James and collaborators have found is a restriction on which “letters” can appear next to each other, based on the properties of a mathematical object called a cluster algebra. Oddly, the restriction seems to have the same effect as a more physics-based condition we’d been using earlier. This suggests that the abstract mathematical restriction and the physics-based restriction are somehow connected, but we don’t yet understand how. It also could be useful for letting us calculate amplitudes with more particles: previously we thought the number of “letters” we’d have to consider there was going to be infinite, but with James’s restriction we’d only need to consider a finite number.

I didn’t get a chance to read David Dunbar, John Godwin, Guy Jehu, and Warren Perkins’s paper. They’re computing amplitudes in QCD (which unlike N=4 super Yang-Mills actually describes the real world!) and doing so for fairly complicated arrangements of particles. They claim to get remarkably simple expressions: since that sort of claim was what jump-started our investigations into N=4, I should probably read this if only to see if there’s something there in the real world amenable to our technique.

I also haven’t read Rutger Boels and Hui Lui’s paper yet. From the abstract, I’m still not clear which parts of what they’re describing is new, or how much it improves on existing methods. It will probably take a more thorough reading to find out.

I really ought to read Burkhard Eden, Yunfeng Jiang, Dennis le Plat, and Alessandro Sfondrini’s paper. They’re working on a method referred to as the Hexagon Operator Product Expansion, or HOPE. It’s related to an older method, the Pentagon Operator Product Expansion (POPE), but applicable to trickier cases. I’ve been keeping an eye on the HOPE in part because my collaborators have found the POPE very useful, and the HOPE might enable something similar. It will be interesting to find out how Eden et al.’s paper modifies the HOPE story.

Finally, I’ll probably find the time to read my former colleague Sebastian Mizera’s paper. He’s found a connection between the string-theory-like CHY picture of scattering amplitudes and some unusual mathematical structures. I’m not sure what to make of it until I get a better idea of what those structures are.

One, Two, Infinity

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Physicists and mathematicians count one, two, infinity.

We start with the simplest case, as a proof of principle. We take a stripped down toy model or simple calculation and show that our idea works. We count “one”, and we publish.

Next, we let things get a bit more complicated. In the next toy model, or the next calculation, new interactions can arise. We figure out how to deal with those new interactions, our count goes from “one” to “two”, and once again we publish.

By this point, hopefully, we understand the pattern. We know what happens in the simplest case, and we know what happens when the different pieces start to interact. If all goes well, that’s enough: we can extrapolate our knowledge to understand not just case “three”, but any case: any model, any calculation. We publish the general case, the general method. We’ve counted one, two, infinity.

Once we’ve counted “infinity”, we don’t have to do any more cases. And so “infinity” becomes the new “zero”, and the next type of calculation you don’t know how to do becomes “one”. It’s like going from addition to multiplication, from multiplication to exponentiation, from exponentials up into the wilds of up-arrow notation. Each time, once you understand the general rules you can jump ahead to an entirely new world with new capabilities…and repeat the same process again, on a new scale. You don’t need to count one, two, three, four, on and on and on.

Of course, research doesn’t always work out this way. My last few papers counted three, four, five, with six on the way. (One and two were already known.) Unlike the ideal cases that go one, two, infinity, here “two” doesn’t give all the pieces you need to keep going. You need to go a few numbers more to get novel insights. That said, we are thinking about “infinity” now, so look forward to a future post that says something about that.

A lot of frustration in physics comes from situations when “infinity” remains stubbornly out of reach. When people complain about all the models for supersymmetry, or inflation, in some sense they’re complaining about fields that haven’t taken that “infinity” step. One or two models of inflation are nice, but by the time the count reaches ten you start hoping that someone will describe all possible models of inflation in one paper, and see if they can make any predictions from that.

(In particle physics, there’s an extent to which people can actually do this. There are methods to describe all possible modifications of the Standard Model in terms of what sort of effects they can have on observations of known particles. There’s a group at NBI who work on this sort of thing.)

The gold standard, though, is one, two, infinity. Our ability to step back, stop working case-by-case, and move on to the next level is not just a cute trick: it’s a foundation for exponential progress. If we can count one, two, infinity, then there’s nowhere we can’t reach.

When It Rains It Amplitudes

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The last few weeks have seen a rain of amplitudes papers on arXiv, including quite a few interesting ones.

As well as a fair amount of actual rain in Copenhagen

Over the last year Nima Arkani-Hamed has been talking up four or five really interesting results, and not actually publishing any of them. This has understandably frustrated pretty much everybody. In the last week he published two of them, Cosmological Polytopes and the Wavefunction of the Universe with Paolo Benincasa and Alexander Postnikov and Scattering Amplitudes For All Masses and Spins with Tzu-Chen Huang and Yu-tin Huang. So while I’ll have to wait on the others (I’m particularly looking forward to seeing what he’s been working on with Ellis Yuan) this can at least tide me over.

Cosmological Polytopes and the Wavefunction of the Universe is Nima & co.’s attempt to get a geometrical picture for cosmological correlators, analogous to the Ampituhedron. Cosmological correlators ask questions about the overall behavior of the visible universe: how likely is one clump of matter to be some distance from another? What sorts of patterns might we see in the Cosmic Microwave Background? This is the sort of thing that can be used for “cosmological collider physics”, an idea I mention briefly here.

Paolo Benincasa was visiting Perimeter near the end of my time there, so I got a few chances to chat with him about this. One thing he mentioned, but that didn’t register fully at the time, was Postnikov’s involvement. I had expected that even if Nima and Paolo found something interesting that it wouldn’t lead to particularly deep mathematics. Unlike the N=4 super Yang-Mills theory that generates the Amplituhedron, the theories involved in these cosmological correlators aren’t particularly unique, they’re just a particular class of models cosmologists use that happen to work well with Nima’s methods. Given that, it’s really surprising that they found something mathematically interesting enough to interest Postnikov, a mathematician who was involved in the early days of the Amplituhedron’s predecessor, the Positive Grassmannian. If there’s something that mathematically worthwhile in such a seemingly arbitrary theory then perhaps some of the beauty of the Amplithedron are much more general than I had thought.

Scattering Amplitudes For All Masses and Spins is on some level a byproduct of Nima and Yu-tin’s investigations of whether string theory is unique. Still, it’s a useful byproduct. Many of the tricks we use in scattering amplitudes are at their best for theories with massless particles. Once the particles have masses our notation gets a lot messier, and we often have to rely on older methods. What Nima, Yu-tin, and Tzu-Chen have done here is to build a notation similar to what we use for massless particle, but for massive ones.

The advantage of doing this isn’t just clean-looking papers: using this notation makes it a lot easier to see what kinds of theories make sense. There are a variety of old theorems that restrict what sorts of theories you can write down: photons can’t interact directly with each other, there can only be one “gravitational force”, particles with spins greater than two shouldn’t be massless, etc. The original theorems were often fairly involved, but for massless particles there were usually nice ways to prove them in modern amplitudes notation. Yu-tin in particular has a lot of experience finding these kinds of proofs. What the new notation does is make these nice simple proofs possible for massive particles as well. For example, you can try to use the new notation to write down an interaction between a massive particle with spin greater than two and gravity, and what you find is that any expression you write breaks down: it works fine at low energies, but once you’re looking at particles with energies much higher than their mass you start predicting probabilities greater than one. This suggests that particles with higher spins shouldn’t be “fundamental”, they should be explained in terms of other particles at higher energies. The only way around this turns out to be an infinite series of particles to cancel problems from the previous ones, the sort of structure that higher vibrations have in string theory. I often don’t appreciate papers that others claim are a pleasure to read, but this one really was a pleasure to read: there’s something viscerally satisfying about seeing so many important constraints manifest so cleanly.

I’ve talked before about the difference between planar and non-planar theories. Planar theories end up being simpler, and in the case of N=4 super Yang-Mills this results in powerful symmetries that let us do much more complicated calculations. Non-planar theories are more complicated, but necessary for understanding gravity. Dual Conformal Symmetry, Integration-by-Parts Reduction, Differential Equations and the Nonplanar Sector, a new paper by Zvi Bern, Michael Enciso, Harald Ita, and Mao Zeng, works on bridging the gap between these two worlds.

Most of the paper is concerned with using some of the symmetries of N=4 super Yang-Mills in other, more realistic (but still planar) theories. The idea is that even if those symmetries don’t hold one can still use techniques that respect those symmetries, and those techniques can often be a lot cleaner than techniques that don’t. This is probably the most practically useful part of the paper, but the part I was most curious about is in the last few sections, where they discuss non-planar theories. For a while now I’ve been interested in ways to treat a non-planar theory as if it were planar, to try to leverage the powerful symmetries we have in planar N=4 super Yang-Mills elsewhere. Their trick is surprisingly simple: they just cut the diagram open! Oddly enough, they really do end up with similar symmetries using this method. I still need to read this in more detail to understand its limitations, since deep down it feels like something this simple couldn’t possibly work. Still, if anything like the symmetries of planar N=4 holds in the non-planar case there’s a lot we could do with it.

There are a bunch of other interesting recent papers that I haven’t had time to read. Some look like they might relate to weird properties of N=4 super Yang-Mills, others say interesting things about the interconnected web of theories tied together by their behavior when a particle becomes “soft”. Another presents a method for dealing with elliptic functions, one of the main obstructions to applying my hexagon function technique to more situations. And of course I shouldn’t fail to mention a paper by my colleague Carlos Cardona, applying amplitudes techniques to AdS/CFT. Overall, a lot of interesting stuff in a short span of time. I should probably get back to reading it!

4 gravitons

The trials and tribulations of four gravitons and a postdoc