High-energy limits of AdS string amplitudes

by Maria Nocchi (University of Oxford)

Wednesday 5 Mar 2025, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Berlin

A.1.01/03 - Alps (New)

One of the earliest and most significant achievements of string theory is the Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude for the tree-level scattering of four gravitons. An outstanding question is how to generalize to curved spacetimes, where a worldsheet theory is still lacking. Nonetheless, AdS/CFT provides a powerful indirect tool for computing string amplitudes in AdS from boundary CFT correlators. In this talk, I will discuss recent progress on the "AdS Virasoro-Shapiro" amplitude, studied by CFT methods combined with single-valuedness, which echoes its importance in flat space. The amplitude is defined as an expansion around flat space. While the goal is to compute it to all orders, attention can be placed on more tractable limits. I will present our results for the High Energy limit, with dual insights from the spacetime and worldsheet perspectives, and the richer case of the Regge limit, which encodes full information on the intermediate operators in the leading Regge trajectory.