Chuck DarwinIn the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named #Carolina #Figueiredo
stumbled onto a massive coincidence.
She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic particles would all produce the same wreckage.
“They are very different [particle] theories.
There’s no reason for them to be connected,” Figueiredo said.
The coincidence soon revealed itself to be a conspiracy:
The theories describing the three types of particles were,
when viewed from the right perspective,
essentially one.
The conspiracy, Figueiredo and her colleagues realized, stems from the existence of a hidden structure,
one that could potentially simplify the complex business of understanding what’s going on at the base level of reality.
For nearly two decades, Figueiredo’s doctoral advisor, #Nima #Arkani-#Hamed
has been leading a hunt for a new way of doing physics.
Many physicists believe they’ve reached the end of the road when it comes to conceptualizing reality in terms of quantum events that play out in space and time.
Such language can’t easily describe the beginning of the universe, for instance,
when the space-time fabric likely didn’t exist in its current form.
Arkani-Hamed therefore suspects that the usual notion of quantum particles moving and interacting in space-time is an approximation of deeper, more abstract concepts,
which, if found, could serve as a better language for talking about quantum gravity and the origin of the universe.
A major development came in 2013, when Arkani-Hamed and his student at the time, #Jaroslav #Trnka, discovered a jewel-like geometric object that forecasts the outcome of certain particle interactions.
They called the object the “#amplituhedron.”
However, the object didn’t apply to the particles of the real world.
So Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues sought more such objects that would
Figueiredo’s conspiracy is another manifestation of abstract geometric structure that seems to underlie particle physics.
“The overall program is inching closer to Nima’s long-term dream of space-time and quantum mechanics emerging from a new set of principles,”
said Sebastian Mizera, a physicist who studies amplitudes at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, but was not involved in the recent work.
Like the amplituhedron, the new geometrical method,
known as “#surfaceology,” streamlines quantum physics by sidestepping the traditional approach,
which is to track the countless ways particles can move through space-time using “Feynman diagrams.”
These depictions of particles’ possible collisions and trajectories translate into complicated equations.
With surfaceology, physicists can get the same result more directly.
“It provides a natural framework, or a bookkeeping mechanism,
to assemble very large numbers of Feynman diagrams,” said #Marcus #Spradlin, a physicist at Brown University who has been picking up the new tools of surfaceology.
“There’s an exponential compactification in information.”
Unlike the amplituhedron,
which required exotic particles to provide a balance known as supersymmetry,
surfaceology applies to more realistic, nonsupersymmetric particles.
“It’s completely agnostic. It couldn’t care less about supersymmetry,” Spradlin said.
“For some people, me included, I think that’s really been quite a surprise.”
The question now is whether this new, more primitive geometric approach to particle physics will allow theoretical physicists to slip the confines of space and time altogether.
“We needed to find some magic, and maybe this is it,” said #Jacob #Bourjaily, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University.
“Whether it’s going to get rid of space-time, I don’t know.
But it’s the first time I’ve seen a door.”
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