School of Physical and Chemical Sciences welcomes global physics community for Amplitudes 2026

20 July 2026

The five-day event welcomed around 225 delegates from approximately 20 countries and close to 100 institutions across Europe, the Americas and Asia, with the largest contingents travelling from the UK, USA, Germany and China. 

The conference focused on scattering amplitudes, mathematical quantities that describe how particles interact. These calculations underpin many of the world's most important experiments in fundamental physics, including those carried out at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, as well as the modelling of gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes. 

Throughout the week, researchers presented advances in the mathematical structures that underpin scattering amplitudes, including the amplituhedron and related cluster algebras. They also unveiled exceptionally precise new predictions for particle collider experiments and gravitational-wave observations, alongside new ideas in cosmology that could deepen our understanding of the Universe. 

A particular highlight of the conference was a special discussion titled "Amplitudes before Amplitudes", bringing together four pioneers of the field: Zvi Bern (University of California, Los Angeles), Lance Dixon (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory/Stanford University), David Dunbar (Swansea University) and David Kosower (IPhT, CEA-Saclay). The panel reflected on their work computing scattering amplitudes in the 1990s, before Edward Witten's landmark 2003 twistor paper transformed the subject and sparked the modern boom from which the Amplitudes series grew.

The discussion was a memorable way to show how far the field has come in a generation, highlighting the remarkable expansion of the field over the past two decades. When Queen Mary first hosted the conference in 2010, just 54 delegates attended. This year's meeting attracted more than four times that number, demonstrating the increasing importance of scattering amplitudes across both mathematics and physics.

Running annually since 2009, the Amplitudes conference series is the flagship meeting for the international scattering amplitudes community. The field sits at the intersection of pure mathematics and theoretical physics, with methods that now play a central role in making precision predictions for particle colliders and modelling gravitational-wave signals. Queen Mary is the first institution to host the conference twice, reflecting the University's international reputation in this area of research. 

Queen Mary's Centre for Theoretical Physics and Astronomy is one of the leading amplitudes groups in the world, and the local organisers Andreas Brandhuber, Ricardo Monteiro, Gabriele Travaglini, Congkao Wen and Chris White are all well-established figures in the field. QMUL also led the EU-funded SAGEX Innovative Training Network ("Scattering Amplitudes: from Geometry to Experiment"), whose legacy funding supported this conference. Our University combines research strength in this area with a track record of coordinating this international network. 

Among the distinguished invited speakers were Nima Arkani-Hamed (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), and David Kosower (IPhT, CEA-Saclay), who opened the conference with a lecture on scattering amplitudes for gravitational waves. 

Amplitudes 2026 was supported by the legacy of SAGEX (Scattering Amplitudes: from Geometry to Experiment), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network funded by the European Commission. The network brought together researchers across Europe to advance the development and application of scattering amplitude methods, helping to strengthen the international collaborations celebrated at this year's conference.