Weekly seminars

Ambitwistor strings and the scattering equations

par Piotr Tourkine

Europe/Paris
Auditorium Vivargent (LAPTh)

Auditorium Vivargent

LAPTh

9, chemin de Bellevue Annecy-le-Vieux 74940 ANNECY
Description

In this talk I will attempt to review a set of recent developments revolving around the “scattering equations”. This formalism, originally discovered in 201, reformulates the scattering amplitudes of quantum field theory as integrals on the Riemann sphere localised at the solutions to these equations.
The formulation was completely new, and was soon understood to be described by a string theory living in Ambitwistor space describing only QFT. One of the most important results of this formalism was that it allowed to use twistor inspired method and the beautiful ideas of Penrose to describe loop corrections to QFT. I’ll mention quickly some results on this.
I’ll also mention how this formalism is related to good old string theory, via a quantization ambiguity which was lying forgotten in the 80s-90s literature.

A variety of questions related to this area of research remain totally open and I will mention another few.

The talk will be non-technical.

Organisé par

seminars@lapth.cnrs.fr