Planar Amplitudes in Maximally Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory

Abstract

The collinear factorization properties of two-loop scattering amplitudes in dimensionally regulated N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory suggest that, in the planar ('t Hooft) limit, higher-loop contributions can be expressed entirely in terms of one-loop amplitudes. We demonstrate this relation explicitly for the two-loop four-point amplitude and, based on the collinear limits, conjecture an analogous relation for n-point amplitudes. The simplicity of the relation is consistent with intuition based on the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence that the form of the large-N(c) L-loop amplitudes should be simple enough to allow a resummation to all orders.