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arXiv · 1411.5012

Dilogarithm ladders from Wilson loops

Marco S. Bianchi·Matias Leoni
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Abstract

We consider a light-like Wilson loop in N=4 SYM evaluated on a regular n-polygon contour. Sending the number of edges to infinity the polygon approximates a circle and the expectation value of the light-like WL is expected to tend to the localization result for the circular one. We show this explicitly at one loop, providing a prescription to deal with the divergences of the light-like WL and the large n limit. Taking this limit entails evaluating certain sums of dilogarithms which, for a regular polygon, evaluate to the same constant independently of n. We show that this occurs thanks to underpinning dilogarithm identities, related to the so-called polylogarithm ladders, which appear in rather different contexts of physics and mathematics and enable us to perform the large n limit analytically.

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Marco S. Bianchi, Matias Leoni. 2014-11-18. Dilogarithm ladders from Wilson loops. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep02(2015)180

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