English

The hexagon Wilson loop and the BDS ansatz for the six-gluon amplitude

High Energy Physics - Theory 2008-11-26 v2

Abstract

As a test of the gluon scattering amplitude/Wilson loop duality, we evaluate the hexagonal light-like Wilson loop at two loops in N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. We compare its finite part to the Bern-Dixon-Smirnov (BDS) conjecture for the finite part of the six-gluon amplitude. We find that the two expressions have the same behavior in the collinear limit, but they differ by a non-trivial function of the three (dual) conformally invariant variables. This implies that either the BDS conjecture or the gluon amplitude/Wilson loop duality fails for the six-gluon amplitude, starting from two loops. Our results are in qualitative agreement with the analysis of Alday and Maldacena of scattering amplitudes with infinitely many external gluons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0712.4138,
  title  = {The hexagon Wilson loop and the BDS ansatz for the six-gluon amplitude},
  author = {J. M. Drummond and J. Henn and G. P. Korchemsky and E. Sokatchev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0712.4138},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 figures; typos corrected