Worldsheets in holography: Computing corrections to the Veneziano amplitude

Abstract

We provide a brief summary of a method to calculate improvements to the Veneziano amplitude, creating sub-leading nonlinearities in the Regge trajectory of states. We formulate it as an extension of a computation by Makeenko and Olesen. We begin in a confining gauge theory coupled to matter, rewriting the meson scattering amplitude as a specific path integral over shapes and sizes of closed Wilson loops using the worldline formalism. We then prescribe how to further the computation at strong coupling by employing holography, which provides a prescription for the expectation value of these Wilson loops in strongly coupled regimes. The computation we desire then appears to subsume to a certain calculation in the effective field theory of a string worldsheet embedded in a certain broad class of allowed holographic backgrounds. A convenient interaction picture presents itself naturally in this context, allowing us to draw Feynman diagrams corresponding to the first few corrections due to weaker coupling regimes. The answer we find has qualitatively the same features as other endeavors with the same objective.