Conformal collider bootstrap in ${\mathcal N}=4$ SYM
Abstract
We use a combination of perturbation theory, holography, supersymmetric localization, integrability, and numerical conformal bootstrap methods to constrain the energy-energy correlator in SYM at finite coupling. For finite , 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 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.
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