18.05.2022 (Wednesday)

Bootstrapping the Maldacena Wilson line at strong coupling

Regular Seminar Pietro Ferrero (Mathematical Institute, Oxford University)

at:
13:45 KCL
room K0.20
abstract:

The insertion of local operators along a straight Maldacena Wilson line in planar N=4 super Yang Mills defines a defect supersymmetric conformal field theory in one dimension. This is a simple but interesting setup where one can combine field theory techniques such as bootstrap, integrability and localization, aiming at a full solution of a non-trivial quantum mechanical system. I will adopt a bootstrap approach and study correlation functions of local operators for large t Hooft coupling, where the system is dual to an open superstring in $AdS_5 \times S^5$. I will present results for the four-point function of the displacement multiplet of the 1d defect CFT corresponding to three-loop diagrams in AdS, which are obtained using a suitable position-space ansatz and after considering a large system of mixed correlators. The problem is made particularly hard by the large degeneracy of operators at strong coupling, which we solve by taking into account four-point functions with external unprotected operators. The simple 1d kinematics is an ideal toy model for bootstrap techniques of interest for higher-dimensional cases as well. The seminar will be based on published as well as ongoing work with Carlo Meneghelli (see arxiv:2103.10440).