Harmony of Scattering Amplitudes: From Quantum Chromodynamics to Gravity Zvi Bern, Professor of Physics, University of California, Los Angeles

Feynman diagrams have long been the basic tool in quantum field theory giving a systematic description of scatter amplitudes. However, they can greatly obscure the beauty and simplicity of scattering amplitudes, introducing complicated unphysical contributions that cancel only at the end of computations. We describe modern ideas allowing us to sneak past Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to reveal a remarkable simplicity in scattering amplitudes. We also describe relations between the way gravitons and gluons scatter, crying out for a unification of the sort seen in string theory. These ideas allow us to perform calculations addressing fundamental questions in quantum field theory that even a few years ago would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible. We describe state of the art applications to physics at the Large Hadron Collider, Maldacena's correspondence between gauge and gravity theories and to studies of the ultraviolet properties of quantum gravity.