Contributor info: Dr William J. Torres Bobadilla

Riccardo Aliberti, Paolo Beltrame, Ettore Budassi, Carlo M. Carloni Calame, Gilberto Colangelo, Lorenzo Cotrozzi, Achim Denig, Anna Driutti, Tim Engel, Lois Flower, Andrea Gurgone, Martin Hoferichter, Fedor Ignatov, Sophie Kollatzsch, Bastian Kubis, Andrzej Kupść, Fabian Lange, Alberto Lusiani, Stefan E. Müller, Jérémy Paltrinieri, Pau Petit Rosàs, Fulvio Piccinini, Alan Price, Lorenzo Punzi, Marco Rocco, Olga Shekhovtsova, Andrzej Siódmok, Adrian Signer, Giovanni Stagnitto, Peter Stoffer, Thomas Teubner, William J. Torres Bobadilla, Francesco P. Ucci, Yannick Ulrich, Graziano Venanzoni

SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 9 (2025) · published 25 June 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We present the results of Phase I of an ongoing review of Monte Carlo tools relevant for low-energy hadronic cross sections. This includes a detailed comparison of Monte Carlo codes for electron–positron scattering into a muon pair, pion pair, and electron pair, for scan and radiative-return experiments. After discussing the various approaches that are used and effects that are included, we show differential cross sections obtained with AfkQed, BabaYaga@NLO, KKMC, MCGPJ, McMule, Phokhara, and Sherpa, for scenarios that are inspired by experiments providing input for the dispersive evaluation of the hadronic vacuum polarisation.

Paolo Benincasa, William J. Torres Bobadilla

SciPost Phys. 12, 192 (2022) · published 10 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The way we organise perturbation theory is of fundamental importance both for computing the observables of relevance and for extracting fundamental physics out of them. If on one hand the different ways in which the perturbative observables can be written make manifest different features ({\it e.g.} symmetries as well as principles such as unitarity, causality and locality), on the other hand precisely demanding that some concrete features are manifest lead to different ways of organising perturbation theory. In the context of flat-space scattering amplitudes, a number of them are already known and exploited, while much less is known for cosmological observables. In the present work, we show how to systematically write down both the wavefunction of the universe and the flat-space scattering amplitudes, in such a way that they manifestly show physical poles only. We make use of the invariant definition of such observables in terms of {\it cosmological polytopes} and their {\it scattering facet}. In particular, we show that such representations correspond to triangulations of such objects through hyperplanes identified by the intersection of their facets outside of them. All possible triangulations of this type generate the different representations. This allows us to provide a general proof for the conjectured all-loop causal representation of scattering amplitudes. Importantly, all such representations can be viewed as making explicit a subset of compatible singularities, and our construction provides a way to extend Steinmann relations to higher codimension singularities for both the flat-space scattering amplitudes and the cosmological wavefunction.