Mon, 24 Jan 2011

12:00 - 13:00
L3

Scattering Amplitudes and Holomorphic Linking in Twistor Space

Mathew Bullimore
(Oxford)
Abstract
Recently, there has been exciting progress in scattering amplitudes in supersymmetric gauge theories, one aspect of which is the remarkable duality between amplitudes and Wilson loops. I will explain how the complete planar S-matrix of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory is encoded in the complex analogue of a Wilson loop in holomorphic Chern-Simons theory on twistor space. The dynamics of the theory are encoded in loop equations, which describe deformations of the Wilson Loop and provide new insight into the nature of the amplitude-Wilson loop duality. The loop equations themselves yield powerful recursive methods for scattering amplitudes which are revealed as holomorphic skein relations by interpreting the Wilson loop as the complex analogue of a knot invariant. The talk will be based on the preprint arXiv:1101.1329.
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