Ladders for Wilson Loops Beyond Leading Order

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to resum ladder diagrams for the quark-antiquark potential in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, achieving next-to-leading order results that match string theory predictions at strong coupling.

Contribution

It introduces a general scheme for resumming ladder diagrams beyond leading order in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, with explicit next-to-leading order calculations.

Findings

Results agree with string theory predictions at strong coupling.

The scheme successfully resums ladder diagrams beyond leading order.

Explicit calculations confirm the validity of the approach.

Abstract

We set up a general scheme to resum ladder diagrams for the quark-anti-quark potential in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, and do explicit calculations at the next-to-leading order. The results perfectly agree with string theory in AdS(5)xS(5) when continued to strong coupling, in spite of a potential order-of-limits problem.