Physics Graduate Student Symposium Seminar

Hidden Symmetries of the S-matrix: From Goldstone Modes to Supermembranes

Over the past decade-and-a-half there has emerged an exciting new subfield in high-energy theory challenging the primacy of the role of quantized fields in the description of the scattering of fundamental particles. Powerful new techniques allow scattering amplitudes to be recursively "bootstrapped" from the most primitive interactions and symmetry principles, entirely avoiding the apparatus of Feynman diagrammatics. These ideas have lead to new insights into the dynamics of fundamental particles and quantum gravity. In this talk I will give an overview of recent work describing the recursive construction of scattering amplitudes for Goldstone modes of spontaneously broken symmetries. In particular I will discuss the spontaneous breaking of spacetime symmetries, including supersymmetry, and argue that the landscape of possible self-consistent models which emerge should be understood in terms of the effective description of the dynamics of extended objects called supermembranes.