17.01.2019 / 14:15 - 15:15 / Hamburg, seminar room 2, bldg. 2a

String Theory Seminar

Adventures in Perturbation Theory

Jacob Bourjaily (Europe/Berlin)

There have been incredible advances in our ability to represent perturbative scattering amplitudes in terms of gauge-invariant,physical information. An important insight leading to this progress has been the realization that the still-difficult problem of loop integration can and should be separated from the (now understood to be) much simpler problem of constructing loop integrands. I review and update the powerful unitarity-based methods to construct integrands constructively, and argue that these new representations should make loop integration easier. In the second part of the talk, I discuss evidence testing this conviction. In particular, I will show that many loop integrals turn out to be much easier than many had feared; but that these easy (polylogarithmic) integrals, unfortunately represent a set of measure zero. I will conclude with a survey of recent results addressing the question of: what kinds of functions are needed to represent general amplitudes perturbative quantum field theory?

Mehr Informationen: https://indico.desy.de/indico/event/21284/