Photo Gallery: Amplitudes Summer School 2018

Amplitudes Summer School 2018 was held at the Center for Quantum Mathematics and Physics (QMAP), University of California, Davis on June 11-15, 2018. We had nearly 100 participants coming for a week of lectures on new developments in theoretical exploration of scattering amplitudes.

Before the start


Monday, 8:30am, the registration starts	Lecture room and camera setup	First lecture starts

Lectures


Lance Dixon introduces Yutin Huang	Yutin provides an introduction to scattering amplitudes	BCFW recursion relations is a golden standard

All lectures are recorded and later posted on youtube	Participants were engaged the whole week	Breaks provided a good opportunity to ask additional questions

Zvi Bern lectures on color-kinematics duality and double copy	Graviton amplitudes are there squares of gluonic amplitudes	This was proven at the tree-level but it also works at loop level

Eric D'Hoker gave lectures on string amplitude	Modular graph functions play important role in recent progress	Albert Schwarz asks questions after the lecture

Jacob Bourjaily lectured on Vernicular of S-matrix	This included discussion of mathematics of on-shell diagrams	Jake also gave the tutorial on Mathematica implementation

Claude Duhr gave lectures on integrals and symbols	He discussed polylgarithms which arise in loop amplitudes	Hopf algebras appear in this context

Song He's lectures focused on scattering equations	CHY formula calculates tree-level amplitudes in variety of theories	The loop extension is an active area of research

Alex Postnikov talks about the positive Grassmannian	Alex is an algebraic combinatorist who discovered this subject	As it turns out it plays an important role in scattering amplitudes

Gong show starts: Cameron Langer talks about the Amplituhedron	Gongwang Yan speaks about the CHY and Associahedron	Izzy Nicholson describes spinor helicity formalism in GR

Sebastian Mizera's talk on new formula for amplitudes in 6d	Hadleigh Frost spoke about biadjoint scalar amplitudes	Talk by Mariana Gonzalez. There were 40 speakers in the gong show

Staff appreciation


Lunch was provided outside the lecture room	Nice seating allowed prolonged lunch discussions	The shade was very welcome in the hot California weather

Thanks to our great staff for the help with organization	And making sure everything runs smoothly	From left: Cindy Choi, Matthew Silver, Joann Pyon and Tina Denena (+ absent Sarah Driver, Malina Gillies-Doherty and Alla Savrasova)

Discussions

Nima day


Last day we had series of lectures by Nima Arkani-Hamed	9am: The topic of the first lecture is projective geometry	This concept plays an important role in the amplitudes program

Projective geometry should be thought in the elementary school	But there is never late to start to think projectively	The lecture takes 3 hours and covers all basic topics

1:30pm: Nima is giving a colloquium "Future of particle physics"	Nima explains motivations to build 100 TeV collider	The lecture is one hour, questions take another hour

Discussion continues after the colloquium	4pm: Nima continues to lecture, now on Amplituhedron	This is a new geometric picture for amplitudes in N=4 SYM theory

The crucial ingredient is a logarithmic form	7pm: After-dinner lecture starts	Topic is a new formalism for massive amplitudes

This can be very useful for Standard model calculations	Most participants keep focused and engaged	Not feeling tired after the week of intense lectures

It is getting dark outside	Coffee breaks and discussions move inside	10pm: New lecture starts after the break

Nima explains the significance of the dual Amplituhedron	Wild speculations link it to new picture for string theory	This is a very ambitious idea which attracts attention

Discussions continue during the coffee break	12am: Nima starts next lecture, topic is "Cosmological polytopes"	They describe cosmological correlation functions

And contain scattering amplitudes	Only a subset of participants made it to this point	including Akshay Yeleshpur .....

..... Minshan Zheng ....	and Cameron Langer who is still recording	One of the speakers Song He is also paying attention

3am: Nima finishes with Q&A on Naturalness	3:10am: Final picture with participants who made it till the end	Nima needs to catch his taxi to the airport at 4am.