On planar gluon amplitudes/Wilson loops duality

There is growing evidence that on-shell gluon scattering amplitudes in planar N = 4 SYM theory are equivalent to Wilson loops evaluated over contours consisting of straight, light-like segments defined by the momenta of the external gluons. This equivalence was first suggested at strong coupling using the AdS/CFr correspondence and has since been verified at weak coupling to one loop in perturbation theory. Here we perform an explicit two-loop calculation of the Wilson loop dual to the four-gluon scattering amplitude and demonstrate that the relation holds beyond one loop. We also propose an anomalous conformal Ward identity which uniquely fixes the form of the finite part (up to an additive constant) of the Wilson loop dual to four- and five-gluon amplitudes, in complete agreement with the BIDS conjecture for the multi-gluon MHV amplitudes. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.