Lance Dixon
Theoretical particle physicist at SLAC and Stanford, known for co-developing on-shell methods (generalized unitarity, the amplitude bootstrap) for computing scattering amplitudes in gauge theory and gravity — work that earned him the 2014 APS Sakurai Prize, National Academy of Sciences membership (2022), and the 2023 INFN Galileo Galilei Medal.
He set the prior frontier this spoke now has evidence against: with Andy Liu he reached the eight-loop form factor for the same planar N=4 super-Yang-Mills hexagon amplitude in 2023 (arXiv 2308.08199). Anthropic contacted him on 1 September 2026 to independently validate Fable 5.1's nine-loop result — a two-week re-derivation of his own, not a check of Claude's working — and he wrote the addendum to claude-nine-loop-amplitude-von-hippel describing that check. He received Claude usage credits for the work, a detail worth holding next to the validation itself rather than dropping.
Connections
- Set the prior eight-loop record Claude's nine-loop result improves on
- Independently validated the claim in claude-nine-loop-amplitude-von-hippel, and wrote its addendum
- Received Anthropic Claude credits for the validation (see anthropic-scientist-access-expansion for the AI-for-Science credit programs this sits alongside)
Related
claude-nine-loop-amplitude-von-hippel · matt-von-hippel · claude-fable-5-1 · anthropic-scientist-access-expansion