English

Supersymmetric Wilson loops at two loops

High Energy Physics - Theory 2014-11-18 v2

Abstract

We study the quantum properties of certain BPS Wilson loops in N=4{\cal N}=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. They belong to a general family, introduced recently, in which the addition of particular scalar couplings endows generic loops on S3S^3 with a fraction of supersymmetry. When restricted to S2S^2, their quantum average has been further conjectured to be exactly computed by the matrix model governing the zero-instanton sector of YM2_2 on the sphere. We perform a complete two-loop analysis on a class of cusped Wilson loops lying on a two-dimensional sphere, finding perfect agreement with the conjecture. The perturbative computation reproduces the matrix-model expectation through a highly non-trivial interplay between ladder diagrams and self-energies/vertex contributions, suggesting the existence of a localization procedure.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.3973,
  title  = {Supersymmetric Wilson loops at two loops},
  author = {Antonio Bassetto and Luca Griguolo and Fabrizio Pucci and Domenico Seminara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.3973},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

35 pages, 14 figures, typos corrected, references added

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:34:22.975Z