Planar scattering amplitudes from Wilson loops

Understand

We derive an expression for parton scattering amplitudes of planar gauge theory in terms of sums of Wilson loops.

• We study in detail the example of Yang-Mills theory with an adjoint Higgs field.
• The expression exhibits the T-duality performed by Alday and Maldacena in the AdS dual as a Fourier transform in loop space.
• When combined with the AdS/CFT correspondence for Wilson loops and a strong coupling argument for the dominance of 1PI diagrams, this leads to a derivation of the Alday-Maldacena holographic prescription for scattering amplitudes in terms of momentum Wilson loops.