Abstract: String theory has its origins based on the so-called dual resonance hypothesis which had only slender experimental support. This led to the discovery of the Veneziano amplitude which sums over poles in one channel or the other, unlike what we do in familiar quantum field theory. I will present a new representation of the Veneziano amplitude, arising from a new crossing symmetric dispersion relation—this representation sums over poles in both channels, has contact terms and is analytic everywhere except at the poles. Based on quantum field theory considerations, I will present parametric series representations of the Euler-Beta function and associated transcendental numbers such as pi as well as the Zeta functions. Then I will use a basis motivated by these considerations to set up the narrow resonance bootstrap and present S-matrices which exhibit duality only in the low energy regime (where experimental support existed) but deviate from duality at higher energies. 

Bio: Aninda Sinha is a professor of theoretical physics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore India. He finished his PhD in 2005 from the University of Cambridge, UK with Professor Michael Green and was subsequently a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College and a PPARC postdoctoral fellow DAMTP, Cambridge. From 2007-2010 he was a postdoc in the Perimeter Institute, Canada before returning to India. He won the 2016 ICTP Prize awarded by ICTP, Trieste and the 2019 SSB Prize awarded by the Govt of India. He is an editor for SciPost and is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.