Cusped SYM Wilson loop at two loops and beyond

Abstract

We calculate the anomalous dimension of the cusped Wilson loop in N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory to order λ 2 ( λ = g YM 2 N ). We show that the cancellation between the diagrams with the three-point vertex and the self-energy insertion to the propagator which occurs for smooth Wilson loops is not complete for cusped loops, so that an anomaly term remains. This term contributes to the cusp anomalous dimension. The result agrees with the anomalous dimensions of twist-two conformal operators with large spin. We verify the loop equation for cusped loops to order λ 2 , reproducing the cusp anomalous dimension this way. We also examine the issue of summing ladder diagrams to all orders. We find an exact solution of the Bethe–Salpeter equation, summing light-cone ladder diagrams, and show that for certain values of parameters it reduces to a Bessel function. We conclude that without interaction diagrams the ladder diagrams cannot reproduce the behavior of the cusp anomalous dimension expected for large λ from the AdS/CFT correspondence.