Scattering of Giant Holes

Understand

We study scalar excitations of high spin operators in N=4 super Yang-Mills theory, which are dual to solitons propagating on a long folded string in AdS_3 x S^1.

• In the spin chain description of the gauge theory, these are associated to holes in the magnon distribution in the sl(2,R) sector.
• We compute the all-loop hole S-matrix from the asymptotic Bethe ansatz, and expand in leading orders at weak and strong coupling.
• The worldsheet S-matrix of solitonic excitations on the GKP string is calculated using semiclassical quantization.