3:30 pm
MCP 201 933 East 56th Street
Chicago IL 60637
In this colloquium, I will introduce several key concepts from the modern theory of quantum scattering amplitudes. These ideas have found wide-ranging applications, including in collider physics, supersymmetric gauge theory, supergravity, and gravitational-wave physics. I will show that, within perturbation theory, gauge theories of the type used in collider physics are directly connected to theories of gravity, including Einstein’s general relativity, via a construction known as the double copy. As a particularly recent development, I will explain how this understanding of gravity provides a powerful starting point for obtaining state-of-the-art precision predictions for binary black holes and other compact astrophysical systems relevant to gravitational-wave observations.