Integrated Calendar

After a brief review of some hidden structures recently discovered in scattering amplitudes (amplitude/Wilson loop duality, dual conformal symmetry) we will discuss form factors. These are slightly off-shell quantities, and we will see how on-shell techniques such as unitarity and recursion relations, which have been successfully applied to the calculation of scattering amplitudes over the years, can also be used to derive form factors and explain their simplicity. Similarly to amplitudes, this simplicity is completely obscured by a calculation based on Feynman diagrams. In particular we will focus on form factors of half-BPS operators in N=4 super Yang-Mills and on their supersymmetric formulation, which parallels closely the Nair formalism for superamplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills.

Over the past decades, studies have investigated the neural correlates of consciousness with increasing precision. However, why experience is generated by the cortex and not the cerebellum, why it fades during certain stages of sleep and returns in others, or why some cortical areas endow experience with colors and others with sound, remains unexplained. Moreover, key questions remain unanswered. For example, how much consciousness is there when only a few brain 'islands' remain active? How much during sleepwalking or psychomotor seizures? Are newborns conscious, and to what extent?
Are animals conscious, how much, and in which way? Can a conscious machine be built? To address such questions, empirical observations need to be complemented by a principled theoretical approach. The information integration theory (IIT) has several related aims: to characterize, starting from phenomenology, what consciousness is and how each experience is structured; to account for several neurobiological observations about its neural substrate; and to develop measures of consciousness that can be applied, at least in principles, to humans, animals, and machines.