Colloquium

Speaker: Lauren Williams, Harvard University

Title: Combinatorics and geometry of the amplituhedron

Abstract: The amplituhedron is a geometric object introduced by Arkani-Hamed and Trnka to compute scattering amplitudes in N=4 super Yang Mills theory. It generalizes interesting objects such as cyclic polytopes and the positive Grassmannian. It has connections to tropical geometry, cluster algebras, and combinatorics (plane partitions, Catalan numbers). I’ll give a gentle introduction to the amplituhedron, then survey some recent progress on some of the main conjectures about the amplituhedron: the Magic Number Conjecture, the BCFW tiling conjecture, and the Cluster Adjacency conjecture.  Based on joint works withEvan-Zohar, Lakrec, Parisi, Sherman-Bennett, and Tessler.