BUFFS · Bootstrap and Uniqueness for Form Factors and the S-matrix

Bootstrap and Uniqueness for Form Factors and the S-matrix

The project “Bootstrap and Uniqueness for Form Factors and the S-matrix”, or “BUFFS”, carried out by Dr Rodina Laurentiu, under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Brandhuber at Queen Mary University of London, aimed to provide new insight into the mathematical structures of Quantum Field Theory (QFT). QFT is the mathematical framework used to describe Nature at the most fundamental level, particularly through scattering amplitudes, which encode how elementary particles interact with each other. However, scattering amplitudes are still far from being completely understood. Recent progress has shown that scattering amplitudes contain a much a richer structure than previously thought, which may even help us in the quest to fully understand even the most extreme phenomena in our Universe, such as black holes or the Big Bang itself. The project was aimed to investigate such novel structures, and lead to a deeper understanding of scattering amplitudes. The concrete aims of the project were divided into three tasks, focusing on aspects in which Dr Rodina and members of QMUL could contribute their complementary expert knowledge. The first task was to understand why completely different physical properties of amplitudes, such as their low energy (infrared) or high energy (ultraviolet) limits seem to contain identical information. Solving this mysterious equivalence could potentially lead to a radical new definition of amplitudes, and ultimately of QFT. A second task involved understanding what properties of scattering amplitudes may be carried over to form factors, which are slightly more general objects than scattering amplitudes. The completion of this work would demonstrate that methods of scattering amplitudes, and recently discovered mathematical structures, can be much more generally applied to QFT. A third task involved mapping out the space of theories compatible with fundamental principles. Theories can be described by various parameters, which reflect the strength of particle interactions, or their masses for instance. However, not all values of these parameters lead to consistent theories. At its completion, the project led to several important results in the field. It showed that naively independent amplitude properties are closely connected, potentially bringing closer a complete reformulation of scattering amplitudes. It demonstrated the universality of Hopf algebras, a newly discovered property of certain amplitudes, which may finally explain a strange connection between different physical theories, including gravity. And finally, it showed that the space of allowed Conformal Field Theories can also be described by methods originally developed for scattering amplitudes.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз