Chiral worldsheet model for pure N=4 Super Yang-Mills

It is a remarkable fact (first observed by Witten in 2004) that holomorphic curves in twistor space underpin scattering amplitude calculations in N=4 Super Yang-Mills, spurring decades of work on twistor actions. The explicit realisation of this fact from a twistor string calculation, however, is somewhat marred by the presence of non-Yang-Mills (N=4 conformal supergravity) intermediates present even in tree level calculations. This pathology first appears as the presence of multi-trace terms even at tree level, indicating the exchange of non Yang-Mills intermediates.

 

In this talk we present a new chiral worldsheet model (2504.xxxx) that is free from non-Yang-Mills intermediates and computes N=4 super Yang-Mills amplitudes at tree and loop level (with some caveats). The main contribution is the removal of the non-Yang-Mills intermediates and a simple prescription for computing higher genus correlators.