Chuck Darwin<p>When Shruti Paranjape, <br>a physicist then at the University of California, Davis, <br>saw a slide at a conference last December that listed which quantum theories shared “hidden” zeros, <br>she felt a flash of recognition. </p><p>They were all theories in which it was possible to combine two copies of amplitudes of one theory to make an amplitude of another theory <br>— a somewhat mysterious operation known as the "double copy". </p><p>She and her collaborators showed that if one could double copy a theory, <br>then that theory would have the zeros Figueiredo had found. </p><p>It’s another hint that more theories might be brought into the geometric fold.</p><p>The original surfaceology group is following up on indications that their curves know about much more than just amplitudes for colored particles.</p><p>The typical procedure is to draw only curves that don’t cross themselves. </p><p>But if you include the self-intersecting curves, the researchers noticed, you get a strange-looking amplitude, <br>which turns out not to describe collisions <br>between particles <br>but rather tangled interactions between longer objects known as strings. </p><p>Thus, surfaceology appears to be another route to string theory, <br>a candidate theory of quantum gravity that posits that quantum particles are made of vibrating strings of energy. </p><p>“This formalism, as far as we can tell, <br>contains string theory but allows you to do more things,” Arkani-Hamed said. </p><p>Surfaceology might also account for gravitons, <br>the particles thought to impart the gravitational force. </p><p>While working out how much each curve would contribute to a trace phi cubed amplitude, <br>the group came across curves that were unavoidable but that didn’t change the final answer.</p><p> If the surface had holes, these curves circled around the holes forever, <br>never taking an exit. </p><p>From the space-time perspective, these curves capture events beyond the purview of trace phi cubed theory: <br>colorless particles that the researchers believe could eventually describe gravitons.</p><p>That would be a crucial step toward Arkani-Hamed’s ultimate aspiration of developing a novel theoretical framework for quantum gravity.</p><p>“We don’t yet have a complete working picture of something gravitational,” Arkani-Hamed said. </p><p>“But there are more and more hints that gravity is going to come along.”</p><p>There’s more to quantum gravity than gravitons, <br>which would represent just the mildest ripples in space-time. </p><p>A full theory would need to go beyond ripples to describe what happens when stars collapse and form black holes, <br>warping the space-time fabric to oblivion. </p><p>It should also account for how space-time came into existence during the Big Bang. </p><p>Feynman diagrams capture only the minimal ripples of a quantum field and nothing more. </p><p>So the full picture <br>— what physicists call a “nonperturbative” theory<br> — might be beyond the reach of the geometric paleophysics that these researchers are exploring.</p><p>“I would be surprised if somehow this told us how to build space-time,” said Daniel Harlo, <br>a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. </p><p>“My bias is that all the good stuff in quantum gravity is nonperturbative.”</p><p>Harlow is pursuing another popular research program, <br>known as <a href="https://c.im/tags/holography" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>holography</span></a>, that seeks to capture space-time in its entirety, <br>including the interiors of black holes, <br>by treating it as a hologram of quantum particles moving around in one lower dimension.</p>