High-energy theory
Checking a collaborator's series
About 14 min if you have seen this material before, 35 min or so if it is new to you.
Background
Sometimes a tedious part of the job in theoretical physics is finding mistakes in a paper, or from a collaborator, or your own. This problem is an example of that kind of work, in a case where a pattern in the numbers lets you check them without recomputing each one. Patterns like these show up with some frequency in the equations physics deals with.
The series below is the same one as in the previous problem: order is , summed over the ways of pairing the line-ends of the four-ended vertices of a A picture standing for one contribution to a calculation, with vertices where particles meet and lines joining them..
A collaborator has computed the series
at , and reports these magnitudes . Exactly one entry is wrong.
n T_n
--- -----------
0 1.00000
1 0.0300000
2 0.00480000
3 0.00173250
4 0.000844594
5 0.000545608
6 0.000439214
7 0.000423528
8 0.000475939
9 0.000610789
10 0.000881368The idea is to find the wrong entry without computing every term, and then say what the collaborator did instead of the calculation they meant to do.
Past 1 hr on this? That usually means a missing prerequisite rather than a lack of effort — worth reading up before pushing further, starting with Asymptotic expansion (Wikipedia).