February 8, 2021 to May 17, 2021
America/Toronto timezone

Gravity as the square of gauge theory

Mar 1, 2021, 12:00 p.m.
1h

Speaker

Leron Borsten (Imperial College London)

Description

Can gravity, in certain regards, be the `product' of two gauge theories, such as those appearing in the Standard Model? I will begin by reviewing the Bern—Carrasco—Johansson colour—kinematics duality conjecture, which implies that one can write the scattering amplitudes of Einstein-Hilbert gravity (coupled to a Kalb-Ramond 2-form and dilaton scalar) as the double copy of Yang—Mills amplitudes. Although the colour—kinematics duality, and therefore the double copy, was quickly established at the tree level, it remains a longstanding open problem at the loop level, despite highly non-trivial explicit examples.

I will then describe how one can take this gravity = gauge x gauge' amplitude paradigmoff-shell’ as a product of spacetime fields: the Yang-Mills BRST-Lagrangian itself double copies into perturbatively quantised Einstein-Hilbert gravity coupled to a Kalb-Ramond 2-form and dilaton, establishing the validity of the double copy to all orders, tree and loop. I will end by briefly discussing the homotopy algebras underpinning this result and the inclusion of supersymmetry, which reveals fascinating octonionic structures (some very well-known, others completely new) that will be the subject of Mia Hughes's talk in the following week.

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