Mathematical aspects of scattering amplitudes

Abstract

In these lectures we discuss some of the mathematical structures that appear when computing multi-loop Feynman integrals. We focus on a specific class of special functions, the so-called multiple polylogarithms, and discuss introduce their Hopf algebra structure. We show how these mathematical concepts are useful in physics by illustrating on several examples how these algebraic structures are useful to perform analytic computations of loop integrals, in particular to derive functional equations among polylogarithms.

Comments: 58 pages. Lectures presented at TASI 2014