An Operator Product Expansion for Form Factors

by Dr Alexander Tumanov

Thursday 22 Oct 2020, 11:00 → 13:00 Europe/Berlin

We present an operator product expansion for planar form factors in N=4 SYM theory. This expansion is based on the dual conformal symmetry of these objects or, equivalently, the conformal symmetry of their dual description in terms of periodic Wilson loops. A form factor is decomposed into a sequence of known pentagon transitions and a new universal object that we call the ``form factor transition''. This transition is subject to a set of non-trivial bootstrap constraints, which we expect to be sufficient to determine it at finite coupling. We evaluate the form factor transition for MHV form factors of the chiral half of the stress tensor supermultiplet at leading order in perturbation theory and use it to produce OPE predictions at any loop order. We match the one-loop and two-loop predictions with data available in the literature.