Excited hexagon Wilson loops for strongly coupled $ \mathcal{N} = 4 $ SYM

Abstract

This work is devoted to the six-gluon scattering amplitude in strongly coupled $ \mathcal{N} = 4 $ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. At weak coupling, an appropriate high energy limit of the so-called remainder function, i.e. of the deviation from the BDS formula, may be understood in terms of the lowest eigenvalue of the BFKL hamiltonian. According to Alday et al., amplitudes in the strongly coupled theory can be constructed through an auxiliary 1-dimensional quantum system. We argue that certain excitations of this quantum system determine the Regge limit of the remainder function at strong coupling and we compute its precise value.