Chow Lectures 2025 – In Conversation with Nima Arkani-Hamed

In the past week the Chow Lectures 2025 took place at the MPI MiS. We had the honor of welcoming and interviewing this year’s speaker, the theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. He is a Gopal Prasad Professor at IAS Princeton and known for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory of scattering amplitudes. Together with Jaroslav Trnka, he introduced the amplituhedron and other geometric structures which simplify the calculation of particle interactions in certain quantum field theories. He has received various awards for his work.

The three-day conference, organized by Joris Koefler, Anna-Laura Sattelberger, and Simon Telen, featured a variety of program highlights. Carolina Figueiredo (IAS Princeton), Elia Mazzucchelli (Max Planck Institute for Physics) and Francesca Zaffalon (MPI MiS) set the stage for Nima Arkani-Hamed's Chow Lectures with preparatory lectures for the 100 conference participants. Ruth Britto (Trinity College Dublin) completed the lectures with a research talk on Coaction on Feynman diagrams. The program also included a poster session, in which 15 younger researchers presented their work.

As part of this year's Chow Lectures 2025, two of our PhD students wanted to find out more about him. Joris Koefler and Veronica Calvo Cortes from MPI MiS interviewed Nima about how he got into physics and developed the Amplituhedron, what he thinks makes the UNIVERSE+ Grant special, and much more.

The event was financially supported by the ERC synergy grant UNIVERSE+.

🎥 Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/poUrrdOYzUY