We propose a nonperturbative formulation of planar scattering amplitudes in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, or, equivalently, polygonal Wilson loops. The construction is based on the operator product expansion approach and introduces a new decomposition of the Wilson loop in terms of fundamental building blocks named pentagon transitions. These transitions satisfy a simple relation to the worldsheet S matrix on top of the so-called Gubser-Klebanov-Polyakov vacuum which allows us to bootstrap them at any value of the coupling. In this Letter we present a subsector of the full solution which we call the gluonic part. We match our results with both weak and strong coupling data available in the literature.

Abstract:We elaborate on a non-perturbative formulation of scattering amplitudes/null polygonal Wilson loops in planar N = 4 Super-Yang-Mills theory. It allows one to compute a precise IR finite ratio of scattering amplitudes that captures all the conformally invariant data of interest. Our construction is based on a decomposition of the dual Wilson loops into elementary building blocks named pentagon transitions. This discussion expands on a previous letter of the authors where these transitions were introduced and analyzed for the so-called gluonic excitations. In this paper we revisit these transitions and extend the analysis to the sector of scalar excitations. We restrict ourselves to the single particle transitions and bootstrap their finite coupling expressions using a set of axioms. Besides these considerations, the main focus of the paper is on the extraction of perturbative data from scattering amplitudes at weak coupling and its comparison against the proposed pentagon transitions. We present several tests for both the hexagon and heptagon (MHV and NMHV) amplitudes up to two-and three-loop orders. In attached notebooks we provide explicit higher-loop predictions obtained from our method.

We consider light-like Wilson loops with hexagonal geometry in the planar limit of N = 4 Super-Yang-Mills theory. Within the Operator-Product-Expansion framework these loops receive contributions from all states that can propagate on top of the colour flux tube sourced by any two opposite edges of the loops. Of particular interest are the two-particle contributions. They comprise virtual effects like the propagation of a pair of scalars, fermions, and gluons, on top of the flux tube. Each one of them is thoroughly discussed in this paper. Our main result is the prediction of all the twist-2 corrections to the expansion of the dual 6-gluons MHV amplitude in the near-collinear limit at finite coupling. At weak coupling, our result was recently used by Dixon, Drummond, Duhr and Pennington to predict the full amplitude at four loops. At strong coupling, it allows us to make contact with the classical string description and to recover the (previously elusive) AdS 3 mode from the continuum of two-fermion states. More generally, the two-particle contributions serve as an exemplar for all the multi-particle corrections.

We construct an analytical solution to the integral equation which is believed to describe logarithmic growth of the anomalous dimensions of high spin operators in planar N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory and use it to determine the strong coupling expansion of the cusp anomalous dimension.