Duality between Wilson Loops and Scattering Amplitudes

We summarise the status of an intriguing new duality between planar maximally helicity violating scattering amplitudes and light-like Wilson loops in N=4 super Yang-Mills. In particular, we focus on the role played by (dual) conformal symmetry, which is made predictive by deriving anomalous conformal Ward identities for the Wilson loops. Assuming the duality, the conformal symmetry of the dual Wilson loops becomes an unexpected new symmetry of scattering amplitudes in N=4 SYM.Comment: 10 pages; Presented at the 48th Cracow School of Theoretical Physics "Aspects of Duality"; Acknowledgement adde

Politically alienated or apathetic: young people's attitudes towards party politics in Britain

Following the outcome of the 2001 General Election, when the numbers of abstainers outweighed the numbers of Labour voters, much attention has been focussed upon the state of British democracy, and how to enthuse the electorate - and in particular young people, of whom 61 percent chose to stay away from the polling stations. While the government is exploring ways to make the whole process of voting easier (with ideas such as voting over the telephone and the Internet) it may be failing to tackle the real problem. The main challenge is that many young people appear to find the business of politics uninviting and irrelevant to their everyday lives. This paper examines data derived from a nationwide survey of 705 attainers – young people who are eligible to vote for the first-time and who have only limited experience of formal politics. The findings from the study reveal that these young people are not as apathetic when it comes to “Politics” as conventional wisdom would have us believe. Instead a picture is emerging of a British youth keen to play a more active role in the political process, but who appear to be sceptical of the way the British political system is organised and led, and are turned off by politicians and the political parties

Young people and politics in Britain

Politicians and the media claim that young people are apathetic towards politics, and the turnout among young voters appears to confirm this. But are young people really not interested in politics — or are they simply disenchanted with aspects of the political process

Compulsory voting may reinforce the resentment young people feel toward the political class

With young people much less likely to vote than older generations, it has been proposed the UK follow other countries such as Belgium and Australia by introducing compulsory voting, with IPPR suggesting only first-time voters should be forced to participate. Matt Henn and Nick Foard consider the merits of this proposal using data from a recent survey of voting intentions, concluding it would risk increasing the disconnect between young people and democracy. This post is part of our series on youth participation

Four-gluon scattering at three loops, infrared structure and Regge limit

We compute the three-loop four-gluon scattering amplitude in maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, including its full color dependence. Our result is the first complete computation of a non-planar four-particle scattering amplitude to three loops in four-dimensional gauge theory and consequently provides highly non-trivial data for the study of non-planar scattering amplitudes. We present the amplitude as a Laurent expansion in the dimensional regulator to finite order, with coefficients composed of harmonic poly-logarithms of uniform transcendental weight, and simple rational prefactors. Our computation provides an independent check of a recent result for three-loop corrections to the soft anomalous dimension matrix that predicts the general infrared singularity structure of massless gauge theory scattering amplitudes. Taking the Regge limit of our result, we determine the three-loop gluon Regge trajectory. We also find agreement with very recent predictions for sub-leading logarithms