On a new type of divergence for spiky Wilson loops and related entanglement entropies

Understand

We study the divergences of Wilson loops for a contour with a cusp of zero opening angle, combined with a nonzero discontinuity of its curvature.

• The analysis is performed in lowest order, both for weak and strong coupling.
• Such a spike contributes a leading divergent term proportional to the inverse of the square root of the cutoff times the jump of the curvature.
• As nextleading term appears a logarithmic one in the supersymmetric case, but it is absent in QCD.