DIS in AdS

TL;DR

This paper uses AdS/CFT to compute high-energy quark dipole scattering off a nucleus in a strongly coupled gauge theory, revealing two solutions with different unitarity behaviors and suggesting a pomeron intercept of 1.5.

Contribution

It introduces two extremal string configurations in AdS shock wave backgrounds to analyze dipole scattering, providing insights into unitarity and pomeron intercept at strong coupling.

Findings

One solution respects the black disk limit with _P=1.5.

The saturation scale Q_s ^{1/3} and energy independence.

A second solution violates the black disk limit with _P=2.

Abstract

We calculate the total cross section for the scattering of a quark--anti-quark dipole on a large nucleus at high energy for a strongly coupled N=4 super Yang-Mills theory using AdS/CFT correspondence. We model the nucleus by a metric of a shock wave in AdS_5. We then calculate the expectation value of the Wilson loop (the dipole) by finding the extrema of the Nambu-Goto action for an open string attached to the quark and antiquark lines of the loop in the background of an AdS_5 shock wave. We find two physically meaningful extremal string configurations. For both solutions we obtain the forward scattering amplitude N for the quark dipole--nucleus scattering. We study the onset of unitarity with increasing center-of-mass energy and transverse size of the dipole: we observe that for both solutions the saturation scale Q_s is independent of energy/Bjorken-x and depends on the atomic number of the nucleus as Q_s ~ A^{1/3}. Finally we observe that while one of the solutions we found corresponds to the pomeron intercept of \alpha_P = 2 found earlier in the literature, when extended to higher energy or larger dipole sizes it violates the black disk limit. The other solution we found respects the black disk limit and yields the pomeron intercept of \alpha_P = 1.5. We thus conjecture that the right pomeron intercept in gauge theories at strong coupling may be \alpha_P = 1.5.