Line defects and scattering amplitudes in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence

Abstract

Line defects and scattering amplitudes have proven to be fruitful objects of study in the context of holographic dualities. They serve as valuable theoretical laboratories for the development of non-perturbative methods and have provided fertile ground for unveiling remarkable structures that have deepened our understanding of quantum field theory, such as the positive geometry description of scattering amplitudes in theories like ${\cal N}=4$ super Yang-Mills and ABJM. This thesis focuses on two main goals. The first concerns the application of analytic conformal bootstrap and integrability methods to the study of superconformal line defects in AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$ and AdS$_4$/CFT$_3$ dualities. We present evidence for a vast family of BPS line defects in the context of AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$ correspondences, providing an analytic bootstrap computation of four-point functions along 1/2 BPS defects at next-to-leading order in the strong-coupling regime. Moreover, we analyse the integrability properties of the 1/2 BPS Wilson line of the ABJM theory, whose spectral problem we show to be described by an integrable and open spin chain. We conjecture a Y-system of equations for the cusped Wilson line of the theory, which we test by reproducing the one-loop cusp anomalous dimension. The second goal of the thesis pertains to the analysis of infrared-finite functions, referred to as integrated negative geometries, that arise from the positive geometry description of scattering amplitudes in ABJM. We compute the four-point integrated negative geometries up to three loops and use this result to provide a direct four-loop computation of the light-like cusp anomalous dimension of the theory, in agreement with the integrability-based prediction present in the literature.