Maximally supersymmetric planar Yang-Mills amplitudes at five loops

Abstract

We present an Ansatz for the planar five-loop four-point amplitude in maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in terms of loop integrals. This Ansatz exploits the recently observed correspondence between integrals with simple conformal properties and those found in the four-point amplitudes of the theory through four loops. We explain how to identify all such integrals systematically. We make use of generalized unitarity in both four and $D$ dimensions to determine the coefficients of each of these integrals in the amplitude. Maximal cuts, in which we cut all propagators of a given integral, are an especially effective means for determining these coefficients. The set of integrals and coefficients determined here will be useful for computing the five-loop cusp anomalous dimension of the theory which is of interest for nontrivial checks of the AdS/CFT duality conjecture. It will also be useful for checking a conjecture that the amplitudes have an iterative structure allowing for their all-loop resummation, whose link to a recent string-side computation by Alday and Maldacena opens a new venue for quantitative AdS/CFT comparisons.