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Four-loop cusp anomalous dimension from obstructions

2007; American Physical Society; Volume: 75; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1103/physrevd.75.105011

1550-7998

Freddy Cachazo, Marcus Spradlin, Anastasia Volovich,

Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions

We introduce a method for extracting the cusp anomalous dimension at L loops from four-gluon amplitudes in N=4 Yang-Mills without evaluating any integrals that depend on the kinematical invariants. We show that the anomalous dimension only receives contributions from the obstructions introduced in hep-th/0601031. We illustrate this method by extracting the two- and three-loop anomalous dimensions analytically and the four-loop one numerically. The four-loop result was recently guessed to be f^4 = - (4ζ^3_2+24ζ_2ζ_4+50ζ_6- 4(1+r)ζ_3^2) with r=-2 using integrability and string theory arguments in hep-th/0610251. Simultaneously, f^4 was computed numerically in hep-th/0610248 from the four-loop amplitude obtaining, with best precision at the symmetric point s=t, r=-2.028(36). Our computation is manifestly s/t independent and improves the precision to r=-2.00002(3), providing strong evidence in favor of the conjecture. The improvement is possible due to a large reduction in the number of contributing terms, as well as a reduction in the number of integration variables in each term.