TASI Lectures on Scattering Amplitudes

Abstract

These lectures are a brief introduction to scattering amplitudes. We begin with a review of basic kinematical concepts like the spinor helicity formalism, followed by a tutorial on bootstrapping tree-level scattering amplitudes. Afterwards, we discuss on-shell recursion relations and soft theorems, emphasizing their broad applicability to gravity, gauge theory, and effective field theories. Lastly, we report on some of the new field theoretic structures which have emerged from the on-shell picture, focusing primarily on color-kinematics duality.