This is the introductory chapter of a review collection on integrability in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. In the collection we present an overview of the achievements and the status of this subject as of the year 2010.arXiv:1012.3982v5 [hep-th] PrefaceSince late 2002 tremendous and rapid progress has been made in exploring planar N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory and free IIB superstrings on the AdS 5 × S 5 background. These two models are claimed to be exactly dual by the AdS/CFT correspondence, and the novel results give full support to the duality. The key to this progress lies in the integrability of the free/planar sector of the AdS/CFT pair of models.Many reviews of integrability in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence are available in the literature. They cover selected branches of the subject which have appeared over the years. Still it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain an overview of the entire subject, even for experts. Already for several years there has been a clear demand for an up-to-date review to present a global view and summary of the subject, its motivation, techniques, results and implications.Such a review appears to be a daunting task: With around 8 years of development and perhaps up to 1000 scientific articles written, the preparation would represent a major burden on the prospective authors. Therefore, our idea was to prepare a coordinated review collection to fill the gap of a missing global review for AdS/CFT integrability. Coordination consisted in carefully splitting up the subject into a number of coherent topics. These cover most aspects of the subject without overlapping too much. Each topic is reviewed by someone who has made important contributions to it. The collection is aimed at beginning students and at scientists working on different subjects, but also at experts who would like to (re)acquire an overview. Special care was taken to keep the chapters brief (around 20 pages), focused and self-contained in order to enable the interested reader to absorb a selected topic in one go.As the individual chapters will not convey an overview of the subject as a whole, the purpose of the introductory chapter is to assemble the pieces of the puzzle into a bigger picture. It consists of two parts: The first part is a general review of AdS/CFT integrability. It concentrates on setting the scene, outlining the achievements and putting them into context. It tries to provide a qualitative understanding of what integrability is good for and how and why it works. The second part maps out how the topics/chapters fit together and make up the subject. It also contains sketches of the contents of each chapter. This part helps the reader in identifying the chapters (s)he is most interested in.There are reasons for and against combining all the contributions into one article or book. Practical issues however make it advisable to have the chapters appear as autonomous review articles. After all, they are the works of individuals. They are merely tied together by the...

We bootstrap the all-loop dynamic S-matrix for the homogeneous psu(1, 1|2) 2 spinchain believed to correspond to the discretization of the massive modes of string theory on AdS 3 × S 3 × T 4 . The S-matrix is the tensor product of two copies of the su(1|1) 2 invariant S-matrix constructed recently for the d(2, 1; α) 2 chain, and depends on two antisymmetric dressing phases. We write down the crossing equations that these phases have to satisfy. Furthermore, we present the corresponding Bethe Ansatz, which differs from the one previously conjectured, and discuss how our construction matches several recent perturbative calculations.

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractWe determine the all-loop dressing phases of the AdS 3 /CFT 2 integrable system related to type IIB string theory on AdS 3 ×S 3 ×T 4 by solving the recently found crossing relations and studying their singularity structure. The two resulting phases present a novel structure with respect to the ones appearing in AdS 5 /CFT 4 and AdS 4 /CFT 3 . In the strongly-coupled regime, their leading order reduces to the universal Arutyunov-Frolov-Staudacher phase as expected. We also compute their sub-leading order and compare it with recent one-loop perturbative results, and comment on their weak-coupling expansion.

Abstract:We determine the S-matrix that describes scattering of arbitrary bound states in the light-cone string theory in AdS 5 × S 5 . The corresponding construction relies on the Yangian symmetry and the superspace formalism for the bound state representations. The basic analytic structure supporting the S-matrix entries turns out to be the hypergeometric function 4 F 3 . We show that for particular bound state numbers it reproduces all the scattering matrices previously obtained in the literature. Our findings should be relevant for the TBA and Lüscher approaches to the finite-size spectral problem. They also shed some light on the construction of the universal R-matrix for the centrally-extended psu(2|2) superalgebra.