The Geometry of Scattering Amplitudes (12w5053)

Organizers

Nima Arkani-Hamed (Institute for Advanced Study)

Zvi Bern (University of California at Los Angeles)

Alexander Goncharov (Yale University)

(Oxford University)

(Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics)

Description

The Banff International Research Station will host the "The Geometry of Scattering Amplitudes" workshop from August 26th to August 31st, 2012.




The scattering amplitudes that are the subject of the experiments in the LHC collider in CERN are also a source of much intriguing new mathematics and mathematical physics. In the past they were computed using Feynman diagrams whose complexity increases so rapidly that they were thought only to be amenable to numerical methods. However, recently they have been discovered to have many remarkable hidden symmetries and structures that not only link them to classical areas of algebraic geometry, integrable systems and invariant theory, but also lead to dramatic simplifications of the structures involved. This has led to substantial progress on the analytic side. This meeting will focus on these newly discovered structures that promise to yield not only new developments in mathematics, but also remarkable new insights into the nature of the underlying physical theories.





The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).