Wilson Loops and Minimal Surfaces Beyond the Wavy Approximation

Understand

We study Euclidean Wilson loops at strong coupling using the AdS/CFT correspondence, where the problem is mapped to finding the area of minimal surfaces in Hyperbolic space.

• We use a formalism introduced recently by Kruczenski to perturbatively compute the area corresponding to boundary contours which are deformations of the circle.
• Our perturbative expansion is carried to high orders compared with the wavy approximation and yields new analytic results.
• The regularized area is invariant under a one parameter family of continuous deformations of the boundary contour which are not related to the global symmetry of the problem.