Gluon Scattering in AdS from CFT

TL;DR

This paper systematically studies holographic correlators in various SCFTs, revealing that tree-level gluon scattering amplitudes in AdS are uniquely determined by symmetries, uncovering structures like hidden conformal symmetry and color-kinematic duality.

Contribution

It explicitly constructs all tree-level four-point gluon amplitudes in diverse SCFTs, demonstrating they are fixed by symmetries and revealing new emergent structures.

Findings

Tree-level four-point functions are fully fixed by symmetries.

Discovery of Parisi-Sourlas-like dimensional reductions.

Identification of AdS color-kinematic duality.

Abstract

We present a systematic study of holographic correlators in a vast array of SCFTs with non-maximal superconformal symmetry. These theories include 4d $\mathcal{N}=2$ SCFTs from D3-branes near F-theory singularities, 5d Seiberg exceptional theories and 6d E-string theory, as well as 3d and 4d phenomenological models with probe flavor branes. We consider current multiplets and their generalizations with higher weights, dual to massless and massive super gluons in the bulk. At leading order in the inverse central charge expansion, connected four-point functions of these operators correspond to tree-level gluon scattering amplitudes in AdS. We show that all such tree-level four-point amplitudes in all these theories are fully fixed by symmetries and consistency conditions and explicitly construct them. Our results encode a wealth of SCFT data and exhibit various interesting emergent structures. These include Parisi-Sourlas-like dimensional reductions, hidden conformal symmetry and an AdS version of the color-kinematic duality.