Working on the first research task, Dr Rodina found that a newly discovered property, called amplitude zeroes, can be used to explain the mysterious equivalence between the IR and UV behaviour. Calculations carried out for this task showed that this new property implies the observed IR and the UV behaviours, promising a completely new understanding of amplitudes, including more efficient computational methods. Work on the second objective also benefited from an unexpected breakthrough, when a team at Queen Mary University of London, including the project supervisor, Prof. Andreas Brandhuber, and co-supervisor senior lecturer Dr Congkao Wen, uncovered a potential new structure called Hopf algebras. Together with Dr Wen, and Dr Chen, a former QMUL postdoc, Dr Rodina proved that these algebras are much more universal than previously thought and used them to propose a general formula for scattering amplitudes of gluons. For the third objective, related to the geometrical description of theory space, much of the work focused on applying the approach to the Conformal Field Theory bootstrap. Dr Rodina and collaborators were able to use this approach to solve the longstanding problem of integer-degeneracy.
Dr Rodina’s work was communicated with the scientific community on several occasions, including at the annual conference Amplitudes, in Prague in 2022, followed by a workshop also in Prague, in 2023. Dr Rodina was also invited to give seminars in Paris, Zurich, Taipei, and Beijing. As outreach activities to present research to non-expert audiences, Dr Rodina participated in a group exhibition in Timisoara. This involved creating an artwork titled “A fragment of a future sculpture” together with artist Andreea Albani, utilizing the programming language used in his research. During a planned short visit to Beijing, Dr Rodina also had the opportunity to discuss his research and gain specialist advice with academic community and disseminate the project’s findings at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and Normal College of Hohhut including with students.
