Four-Loop Nonplanar Cusp Anomalous Dimension in N=4 Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory

Abstract

The light-like cusp anomalous dimension is a universal function that controls infrared divergences in quite general quantum field theories. In the maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory this function is fixed fully by integrability to the three-loop order. At four loops a non-planar correction appears which we obtain for the first time from a numerical computation of the Sudakov form factor. Key ingredients are widely applicable methods to control the number-theoretic aspects of the appearing integrals. Our result shows explicitly that quadratic Casimir scaling breaks down at four loops.

Comments: 8 pages, v3: typo fixed for I_2^{(22)} in Supplemental material, final result unchanged