ITMP Seminar "String amplitudes in AdS: lessons from the Regge limit"

Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce that the next ITMP seminar will be held on Wednesday, Feb 26, 18:00 (Moscow time). It will be organised via Zoom.

Speaker: Maria Nocchi, University of Oxford
Title: String amplitudes in AdS: lessons from the Regge limit
Abstract: One of the earliest achievements of string theory is the Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude, which describes the tree-level scattering of four gravitons. An outstanding question is how to generalize to curved spacetimes, where a worldsheet theory is still lacking. Nonetheless, the AdS/CFT correspondence provides a powerful indirect tool for computing string amplitudes in AdS from boundary CFT correlators. In this talk, I will discuss recent progress in the "AdS Virasoro-Shapiro" program, with a focus on its Regge limit. We apply the standard ideas of Regge theory to the AdS amplitude, defined as a curvature expansion around flat space. At each order in the small-curvature expansion, we find an explicit representation as derivatives of the flat space result, with the only necessary input being the CFT data of the leading Regge trajectory. I will conclude by discussing the implications for the putative worldsheet theory and the strong evidence they provide for the proposed full amplitude.