Weighing the Dark Matter Halo

The dark matter problem will be solved only when all of the dark matter is accounted for. Although wimps may be discovered in direct detection experiments soon, we will not know what fraction of the dark matter halo they compose until we measure their local density. In this talk, I will offer a novel method to determine the mass of a wimp from direct detection experiments alone using kinematical consistency constraints. I will then describe a general method to estimate the local density of wimps using both dark matter detection and hadron collider data when it becomes available. These results were obtained in collaboration with Gordon Kane at the University of Michigan.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. To appear in "IDM2004: The 5th International Workshop on the Identification of Dark Matter", eds. N. Spooner and V. Kudryavtse

Amplitudes at Infinity

We investigate the asymptotically large loop-momentum behavior of multi-loop amplitudes in maximally supersymmetric quantum field theories in four dimensions. We check residue-theorem identities among color-dressed leading singularities in $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory to demonstrate the absence of poles at infinity of all MHV amplitudes through three loops. Considering the same test for $\mathcal{N}=8$ supergravity leads us to discover that this theory does support non-vanishing residues at infinity starting at two loops, and the degree of these poles grow arbitrarily with multiplicity. This causes a tension between simultaneously manifesting ultraviolet finiteness---which would be automatic in a representation obtained by color-kinematic duality---and gauge invariance---which would follow from unitarity-based methods.Comment: 4+1+1 pages; 15 figures; details provided in ancillary Mathematica file

Stratifying On-Shell Cluster Varieties: the Geometry of Non-Planar On-Shell Diagrams

The correspondence between on-shell diagrams in maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and cluster varieties in the Grassmannian remains largely unexplored beyond the planar limit. In this article, we describe a systematic program to survey such 'on-shell varieties', and use this to provide a complete classification in the case of $G(3,6)$. In particular, we find exactly 24 top-dimensional varieties and 10 co-dimension one varieties in $G(3,6)$---up to parity and relabeling of the external legs. We use this case to illustrate some of the novelties found for non-planar varieties relative to the case of positroids, and describe some of the features that we expect to hold more generally.Comment: 35 pages, 70 figures, and 1 table; also included is a file with explicit details for our classification. Signs corrected in two residue theorems, and a new interpretation (and formula) given for the las