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.
 

Biography: Maria Nocchi is a Research Assistant Professor at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford. Her research lies at the interface of conformal field theory, scattering amplitudes, and dualities, with a particular interest in the relation between AdS and flat-space physics.

Host: Ian Moult