Physics of the Analytic S-Matrix

Abstract

You might've heard about various mathematical properties of scattering amplitudes such as analyticity, sheets, branch cuts, discontinuities, etc. What does it all mean? In these lectures, we'll take a guided tour through simple scattering problems that will allow us to directly trace such properties back to physics. We'll learn how different analytic features of the S-matrix are really consequences of causality, locality of interactions, unitary propagation, and so on. These notes are based on a series of lectures given in Spring 2023 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Higgs Centre School of Theoretical Physics in Edinburgh.

162 pages

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Principal Landau Determinants
• Spectral representation in Klein space: simplifying celestial leaf amplitudes
• Lattice study of $cc\bar{u}\bar{s}$ tetraquark channel in $D^{(\ast )}{D}_s^{(\ast )}$ scattering
• False vacuum decay of excited states in finite-time instanton calculus
• Five-point Superluminality Bounds
• Dynamical Tidal Response of Non-rotating Black Holes: Connecting the MST Formalism and Worldline EFT
• Unitarity and Unitarization
• Integrated Unitarity for Scattering Amplitudes