The Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time

“It provides a earthy framework, oregon a bookkeeping mechanism, to assemble precise ample numbers of Feynman diagrams,” said Marcus Spradlin, a physicist astatine Brown University who has been picking up the caller tools of surfaceology. “There’s an exponential compactification successful information.”

Unlike the amplituhedron, which required exotic particles to supply a equilibrium known arsenic supersymmetry, surfaceology applies to much realistic, nonsupersymmetric particles. “It’s wholly agnostic. It couldn’t attraction little astir supersymmetry,” Spradlin said. “For immoderate people, maine included, I deliberation that’s truly been rather a surprise.”

The question present is whether this new, much primitive geometric attack to particle physics volition let theoretical physicists to gaffe the confines of abstraction and clip altogether.

“We needed to find immoderate magic, and possibly this is it,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a physicist astatine Pennsylvania State University. “Whether it’s going to get escaped of space-time, I don’t know. But it’s the archetypal clip I’ve seen a door.”

The Trouble with Feynman

Figueiredo sensed the request for immoderate caller magic firsthand during the waning months of the pandemic. She was struggling with a task that has challenged physicists for much than 50 years: predicting what volition hap erstwhile quantum particles collide. In the precocious 1940s, it took a yearslong effort by 3 of the brightest minds of the postwar era—Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and Richard Feynman—to lick the occupation for electrically charged particles. Their eventual occurrence would triumph them a Nobel Prize. Feynman’s strategy was the astir visual, truthful it came to predominate the mode physicists deliberation astir the quantum world.

When 2 quantum particles travel together, thing tin happen. They mightiness merge into one, divided into many, disappear, oregon immoderate series of the above. And what volition really hap is, successful immoderate sense, a operation of each these and galore different possibilities. Feynman diagrams support way of what mightiness hap by stringing unneurotic lines representing particles’ trajectories done space-time. Each diagram captures 1 imaginable series of subatomic events and gives an equation for a number, called an “amplitude,” that represents the likelihood of that series taking place. Add up capable amplitudes, physicists believe, and you get stones, buildings, trees, and people. “Almost everything successful the satellite is simply a concatenation of that worldly happening implicit and implicit again,” Arkani-Hamed said. “Just bully old-fashioned things bouncing disconnected each other.”

There’s a puzzling hostility inherent successful these amplitudes—one that has vexed generations of quantum physicists going backmost to Feynman and Schwinger themselves. One mightiness walk hours astatine a chalkboard sketching byzantine particle trajectories and evaluating fearsome formulas lone to find that presumption cancel retired and analyzable expressions melt distant to permission down highly elemental answers—in a classical example, virtually the fig 1.

“The grade of effort required is tremendous,” Bourjaily said. “And each azygous time, the prediction you marque mocks you with its simplicity.”