English

Conformal collider bootstrap in ${\mathcal N}=4$ SYM

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-12-12 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We use a combination of perturbation theory, holography, supersymmetric localization, integrability, and numerical conformal bootstrap methods to constrain the energy-energy correlator in SU(Nc)\text{SU}(N_c) N=4{\mathcal N}=4 SYM at finite coupling. For finite NcN_c, we derive lower bounds on the second and fourth multipoles of the energy-energy correlator at different couplings, along with a smeared energy-energy correlator as a function of the angle between the two detectors. We present evidence that our lower bounds on the multipoles are nearly saturated by the N=4{\cal N} = 4 SYM theory. In the planar limit, we further use dispersive functionals to obtain tight two-sided bounds on both the first three non-trivial multipoles and on the angular dependence of the energy-energy correlator. As the coupling is varied from weak to strong, the energy-energy correlator exhibits a transition from single-trace to double-trace operator dominance in the collinear limit, which we characterize quantitatively. A similar phenomenon occurs in QCD, where a parton-hadron transition is observed as detectors are brought closer together.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.10796,
  title  = {Conformal collider bootstrap in ${\mathcal N}=4$ SYM},
  author = {Ross Dempsey and Robin Karlsson and Silviu S. Pufu and Zahra Zahraee and Alexander Zhiboedov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.10796},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

97 pages, 22 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:20:50.738Z