Two loop ghost free quantisation of Wilson loops in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills

Abstract

We report a perturbative calculation of the expectation value of the infinite straight line Maldacena-Wilson loop in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory to order g6. Thus, we extend the previous perturbative result by one order. The vacuum expectation value is reformulated in terms of a non-linear and non-local transformation, the Nicolai map, mapping the full functional measure of the interacting theory to that of a free bosonic theory. The results are twofold. The perturbative cancellations of the different contributions to the Maldacena-Wilson loop are by no means trivial and seem to resemble those of the circular Maldacena-Wilson loop at order g4. Furthermore, we argue that our approach to computing quantum correlation functions is competitive with more standard diagrammatic techniques.