Quantum Scattering from Classical Field Theory

This article gives an overview of many of the recent developments in understanding the structure of relativistic scattering amplitudes in gauge theories ranging from QCD to N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, as well as (super)gravity. I also provide a pedagogical introduction to some of the basic tools used to organize and illuminate the color and kinematic structure of amplitudes. This article is an invited review introducing a special issue of Journal of Physics A devoted to "Sca...

We present numerical simulations of colliding wave packets in spontaneously broken SU(2) Yang-Mills-Higgs theory. Compared with pure Yang-Mills theory, introducing the Higgs field leads to new aspects in the dynamics of the system. The evolution of the gauge field and the Higgs field is investigated as a function of the amplitude of the wave packets and of the mass ratio of the Higgs and the gauge boson. We find regions in our parameter space in which initial wave packets sca...

The classical Yang-Mills equations are solved perturbatively in covariant gauge for a collision of two ultrarelativistic nuclei. The nuclei are taken as ensembles of classical color charges on eikonal trajectories. The classical gluon field is computed in coordinate space up to cubic order in the coupling constant g. We construct the Feynman diagrams corresponding to this field and show the equivalence of the classical and diagrammatic approaches. An argument is given which d...

The field of scattering amplitudes plays a central role in elementary-particle physics. This includes various problems of broader interest for collider physics, gravitational physics, and fundamental principles underlying quantum field theory. We describe various applications and theoretical advances pointing towards novel descriptions of quantum field theories. Comments on future prospects are included.

We outline the program to apply modern quantum field theory methods to calculate observables in classical general relativity through a truncation to classical terms of the multi-graviton two-body on-shell scattering amplitudes between massive fields. Since only long-distance interactions corresponding to non-analytic pieces need to be included, unitarity cuts provide substantial simplifications for both post-Newtonian and post-Minkowskian expansions. We illustrate this quantu...

Conventional scattering theory is incomplete in that it does not adequately describe the behaviour of the wave function at macroscopic distances from the scattering reaction volume. In scattering experiments particles are incident from sources at macroscopic distance and measured at macroscopic distance from the microscopic reaction volume. Standard experimental procedure is to describe asymptotic particle motion by classical mechanics. However, this transition to classical m...

A crucial element of scattering theory and the LSZ reduction formula is the assumption that the coupling vanishes at large times. This is known not to hold for the theories of the Standard Model and in general such asymptotic dynamics is not well understood. We give a description of asymptotic dynamics in field theories which incorporates the important features of weak convergence and physical boundary conditions. Applications to theories with three and four point interaction...

We point out that results obtained by M. Ribaric and L. Sustersic, hep-th/0403084, and by M. Blasone, P. Jizba and H. Kleinert, quant-ph/0409021, suggest that the path-integral formalism is the key to a derivation of quantum physics from classical, deterministic physics in the four-dimensional space-time. These results and the 't Hooft conjecture, hep-th/0104219, suggest to consider a relativistic, non-material medium, an ether, as a base for non-local hidden-variable models ...

The dynamics of gluons and quarks in a relativistic nuclear collision are described, within the framework of a classical mean-field transport theory, by the coupled equations for the Yang-Mills field and a collection of colored point particles. The particles are used to represent color source effects of the valence quarks in the colliding nuclei. The possibilities of this approach are studied to describe the real time evolution of small $x$ modes in the classical effective th...

We report on efforts to construct an event generator that calculates the classical gluon field generated at early times in high energy nuclear collisions. Existing approaches utilize numerical solutions of the Yang-Mills equations after the collision. In contrast we employ the analytically known recursion relation in the forward light cone. The few lowest orders are expected to lead to reliable results for times of up to the inverse saturation scale, tau_0 ~ 1/Q_s. In these p...