Particle Theory Seminar - Maria Nocchi - Simons Center for Geometry and Physics

N=4 super Yang–Mills in AdS4: from scattering to bootstrap Placing a quantum field theory in AdS offers a geometric way to tame the infrared while preserving spacetime symmetry, making it a useful laboratory for connecting gauge dynamics to flat-space scattering. I will consider N=4 super Yang-Mills on a fixed AdS4 background, with boundary conditions preserving 3d N=4 supersymmetry and the full SU(N) flavor symmetry. Starting from the microscopic theory, I will derive the tree-level four-point function of the boundary moment-map operators and use it as input for AdS unitarity to reconstruct the correlator at one loop. In the flat-space limit, AdS poles condense into the branch cuts of the four-dimensional gluon S-matrix, while at finite curvature AdS acts as an infrared regulator. The perturbative results also provide a starting point for following the theory across coupling. At weak coupling, the boundary theory is conformal but non-local. Its CFT data can be used as an anchor for a bootstrap toward strong coupling, where we expect the emergence of a local stress tensor, as suggested by the S-dual picture. Host: Ian Moult