Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences - Department of Physics

Department Colloquium: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Travaglini (Queen Mary University of London) will speak about "The harmony of scattering amplitudes".

Abstract

When the result of a complicated calculation turns out to be remarkably simpler than one expects from the complexity of intermediate steps, and the amount of time and paper devoted to the calculation itself, one can rightly suspect there is something about the theory we are studying that we do not fully understand. This is the situation encountered often in scattering amplitudes of elementary particles, and some related quantities known as "form factors" - they display a fascinating, mysterious simplicity, in particular when the calculations are performed in an idealised model theory known as "N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory". To add to the mystery some of the quantities computed in the model theory N=4 super Yang-Mills turn out to be intimately related to physical scattering amplitudes which describe Higgs + multi-gluon processes in nature which are of central importance for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. A notion a universality seems to emerge in the computations described, and I will discuss possible further connections to processes involving the Higgs boson.