Events

Title: Scattering on self-dual Black holes

Abstract: Penrose’s twistor theory demonstrated that the self-dual sector of Einstein’s general relativity is completely integrable.  This talk will explain how this can be exploited to generate efficient scattering formulae by developing a perturbation theory about a fully nonlinear self-dual sector rather than around flat space.  The talk will focus on the example of a self-dual black hole background.  Rather than exploit the twistor theory directly, we find that the complete integrability can be used to solve for linear fields on the bacground using some novel geometric structures, charged helicity raising and lowering operators,  whose existence reflects the underlying simplicity of the self-dual sector in this case.   As a first step, these generate analogues of momentum eigenstates on the background and are simple enough to complete their nonperturbative  two-point scattering off the background.

Bio: Lionel Mason is a Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford where he has been on the faculty since 1994.  He has written over 100 papers on geometry and physics with a focus on twistor methods for gauge and gravity theories.  Early work concerned geometry and integrability with more recent work seeking to uncover hidden structures in scattering amplitudes.  Key achievements include the construction of conformally invariant differential operators, the introduction of twistor actions and their application to a proof of the planar amplitude/Wilson-loop correspondence for supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, and the introduction of ambitwistor string theories, leading to novel constructions of gauge and gravity amplitudes.

Monday, September 25, 2023 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Virtual
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