Lectures on Amplitudes and Symbols

With the advent of the LHC and the need for ever increasing accuracy, techniques in loops calculations have witnessed tremendous progress borrowing from highly complex mathematical structures and improving and adapting these structures. A very recent development concerns  the use of symbols. Giorgios Papathanasiou will introduce some of  these concepts starting from an elementary exposition of how these objects appear from the integrals one encounters in the evaluation of scattering amplitudes beyond tree-level. There will be 4 lectures:

1: Analytic structure of scattering amplitudes and Feynman integrals. Algebraic and transcendental functions. Classical polylogarithms.

2: Multiple polylogarithms (MPL): Integral and Series representations. Shuffle and quasi-shuffle algebras.

3: The symbol map. Properties. Integrability condition. Application: Resolving identities among MPLs and simplifying expressions.

4: (Optional) Advanced topics: The Hopf algebra of MPLs and the coproduct. Bootstrapping amplitudes. Expanding the symbol.

Graspa 2015

Undergraduate Summer School in Particle and Astroparticle Physics of Annecy-le-Vieux, July 16-22 2015

The school aims at introducing Particle Physics and Astroparticle physics to 4th and advanced 3rd year physics students from anywhere in the world. The most recent research topics and results in these fields will be presented. The school consists of 4 days of lectures on LHC Physics, Neutrinos, Heavy Flavours, Astroparticle Physics and Gravitational Waves. Computational tools for these fields will also be introduced during a hands-on session. The students will be immersed in an international research atmosphere. They will be able to spend time and discuss at length with scientists working in the field.

Courses will be in English. No background knowledge on the topics covered beyond a popular science level is assumed. A strong background in Quantum Mechanics is expected, however.

A maximum of 30 students will be admitted.

PhysTeV Les Houches 2015

In a few weeks the high energy physics team will be going to Les Houches. We will be overseeing the 9th session of the LH PhysTeV. This session will coincide with the first beams at the LHC which will soon be  running at 13TeV.

The highlight of the 2015 Les Houches Edition is to take full advantage of the data that has been collected at the LHC so far and prepare for the future runs. The Workshop will devote particular attention to:(i) Higgs physics, and how it shapes our view on the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking; (ii) related searches for New Physics and (iii) progress in new techniques for the calculations and simulation of Standard Model processes. These activities will be conducted in close connection with the development and improvements of related theory tools, in particular of Monte-Carlo event generators.

The Workshop proper runs over one year, including two meetings in Les Houches in the month of June, and exchanges and collaborations before and after the meetings. The meetings in Les Houches will consist of two sessions:

Session I: 1-10 June 2015with emphasis on SM-related issues

Session II: 10-19 June 2015   with emphasis on New-Physics searches

Site of the LH2015 session   Wiki of LH2015

A course on Nonequilibrium Processes

Kirone Mallick from the Institut de Physique Théorique (IPhT) CEA Saclay is giving a set of lectures describing recent advances   in systems far from equilibrium. After a review of equilibrium thermodynamics, the lectures will introduce  the fascinating identities of Jarzinski and Crooks which quantify the transient violations of the second principle. This will be followed by the fluctuation theorem of Gallavoti-Cohen. Here is the exciting programme

1. Review of statistical physics: Equilibrium versus Non-equilibrium. Dynamics, Detailed Balance and Time-reversal.
2. Out of Equilibrium: Large Deviations, Generalized Detailed Balance and the Gallavotti-Cohen theorem.
3. Work Identities: the Jarzynski and Crooks identities.
4. The Asymmetric Exclusion Process: Exact Results
5. A unifying framework: the Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory.