Planar scattering amplitudes from Wilson loops
John McGreevy, Amit Sever
Abstract
We derive an expression for parton scattering amplitudes of planar gauge theory in terms of sums of Wilson loops. We study in detail the example of Yang-Mills theory with an adjoint Higgs field. The expression exhibits the T-duality performed by Alday and Maldacena in the AdS dual as a Fourier transform in loop space. When combined with the AdS/CFT correspondence for Wilson loops and a strong coupling argument for the dominance of 1PI diagrams, this leads to a derivation of the Alday-Maldacena holographic prescription for scattering amplitudes in terms of momentum Wilson loops. The formula leads to a conjecture for a relationship between position-space and momentum-space Wilson loops in N=4 SYM at finite coupling.