We analyze the pentagon transitions involving arbitrarily many flux-tube gluonic excitations and bound states thereof in planar N=4 Super-Yang-Mills theory. We derive all-loop expressions for all these transitions by factorization and fusion of the elementary transitions for the lightest gluonic excitations conjectured in a previous paper. We apply the proposals so obtained to the computation of MHV and NMHV scattering amplitudes at any loop order and find perfect agreement with available perturbative data up to four loops.
We bootstrap the S-matrix of massless particles in unitary, relativistic two dimensional quantum field theories. We find that the low energy expansion of such S-matrices is strongly constrained by the existence of a UV completion. In the context of f
lux tube physics, this allows us to constrain several terms in the S-matrix low energy expansion or -- equivalently -- on Wilson coefficients of several irrelevant operators showing up in the flux tube effective action. These bounds have direct implications for other physical quantities; for instance, they allow us to further bound the ground state energy as well as the level splitting of degenerate energy levels of large flux tubes. We find that the S-matrices living at the boundary of the allowed space exhibit an intricate pattern of resonances with one sharper resonance whose quantum numbers, mass and width are precisely those of the world-sheet axion proposed in [1,2]. The general method proposed here should be extendable to massless S-matrices in higher dimensions and should lead to new quantitative bounds on irrelevant operators in theories of Goldstones and also in gauge and gravity theories.
In this paper we define and study a matrix model describing the M-theory plane wave background with a single Horava-Witten domain wall. In the limit of infinite mu, the matrix model action becomes quadratic and we can identify the matrix Hamiltonian
with a regularized Hamiltonian for hemispherical membranes that carry fermionic degrees of freedom on their boundaries. The number of fermionic degrees of freedom must be sixteen; this condition arises naturally in the framework of the matrix model. We can also prove the exact E_8 symmetry of the spectrum around the membrane vacua at infinite mu, which arises as a current algebra at level one just as in the heterotic string. We also find the full E_8 gauge multiplet as well as the multiple-gluon states, carried by collections of hemispherical membranes. Finally we discuss the dual description of the hemispherical membranes in terms of spherical fivebranes immersed in the domain wall; we identify the correct vacuum of the matrix model and make some preliminary comparisons with the (1,0) superconformal field theory.
We explore the space of consistent three-particle couplings in $mathbb Z_2$-symmetric two-dimensional QFTs using two first-principles approaches. Our first approach relies solely on unitarity, analyticity and crossing symmetry of the two-to-two scatt
ering amplitudes and extends the techniques of [arXiv:1607.06110] to a multi-amplitude setup. Our second approach is based on placing QFTs in AdS to get upper bounds on couplings with the numerical conformal bootstrap, and is a multi-correlator version of [arXiv:1607.06109]. The space of allowed couplings that we carve out is rich in features, some of which we can link to amplitudes in integrable theories with a $mathbb Z_2$ symmetry, e.g., the three-state Potts and tricritical Ising field theories. Along a specific line our maximal coupling agrees with that of a new exact S-matrix that corresponds to an elliptic deformation of the supersymmetric Sine-Gordon model which preserves unitarity and solves the Yang-Baxter equation.
We consider the 2D S-matrix bootstrap in the presence of supersymmetry, $mathbb{Z}_2$ and $mathbb{Z}_4$ symmetry. At the boundary of the allowed S-matrix space we encounter well known integrable models such as the supersymmetric sine-Gordon and restr
icted sine-Gordon models, novel elliptic deformations thereof, as well as a two parameter family of $mathbb{Z}_4$ elliptic S-matrices previously proposed by Zamolodchikov. We highlight an intricate web of relations between these various S-matrices.
Using the recently introduced ACV reduced-action approach to transplanckian scattering of light particles, we show that the $S$-matrix in the region of classical gravitational collapse is related to a tunneling amplitude in an effective field space.
We understand in this way the role of both real and complex field solutions, the choice of the physical ones, the absorption of the elastic channel associated to inelastic multigraviton production and the occurrence of extra absorption below the critical impact parameter. We are also able to compute a class of quantum corrections to the original semiclassical $S$-matrix that we argue to be qualitatively sensible and which, generally speaking, tend to smooth out the semiclassical results.