GGI Tea Breaks' Seminar - Lance Dixon (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

GGI Tea Breaks is a new web-seminars series on the Theory of Fundamental Interactions, covering a wide spectrum of arguments.
The aim is to discuss the open questions in Fundamental physics while offering to researches and pH.D. students a simple introduction to some of the hottest topics in the field.

Speaker:
Lance Dixon (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Title:
“Scattering Amplitudes in Maximally Supersymmetric Gauge Theory and a New Duality”

Abstract
Scattering amplitudes are the arena where quantum field theory directly meets collider experiments. An excellent model for scattering in QCD is provided by N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, particularly in the planar limit of a large number of colors, where the theory becomes integrable, and amplitudes become dual to light-like polygonal Wilson-loop expectation values. The first nontrivial case is the 6-gluon amplitude (hexagonal Wilson loop), which can be computed to 7 loops using a bootstrap which is based on the rigidity of the function space of multiple polylogarithms, together with a few other conditions. It is also possible to bootstrap a particular form factor for the chiral stress-tensor operator to produce 3 gluons, through 8 loops. Remarkably, the two sets of results are related by a mysterious “antipodal” duality, which exchanges the role of branch cuts and derivatives. I will describe how the bootstrapping works and what we know about this new duality.

All the information and materials about the seminars are available on the
GGI website: