Amplitudes at Strong Coupling as Hyper-Kähler Scalars.

Abstract

Alday and Maldacena conjectured an equivalence between string amplitudes in AdS_{5}×S^{5} and null polygonal Wilson loops in planar N=4 super-Yang-Mills (SYM) theory. At strong coupling this identifies SYM amplitudes with areas of minimal surfaces in anti-de Sitter space. For minimal surfaces in AdS_{3}, we find that the nontrivial part of these amplitudes, the remainder function, satisfies an integrable system of nonlinear differential equations, and we give its Lax form. The result follows from a new perspective on "Y systems," which defines a new psuedo-hyper-Kähler structure directly on the space of kinematic data, via a natural twistor space defined by the Y-system equations. The remainder function is the (pseudo-)Kähler scalar for this geometry. This connection to pseudo-hyper-Kähler geometry and its twistor theory provides a new ingredient for extending recent conjectures for nonperturbative amplitudes using structures arising at strong coupling.