Speaker
Alexandre Homrich
Description
There is a longstanding dream of realizing large-N Yang-Mills theory in D = 3,4 as a theory of confining strings. So far, our knowledge of this putative string is restricted to low energies, where one can use an effective field theory to describe small deformations of a long flux tube. In this talk, I will describe what asymptotic freedom of the underlying gauge theory tells us about the high-energy behavior of the string. First, by comparing the partition function of a short cylinder with a perturbative computation, we will extract the high-energy asymptotics of the spectral density of closed-string states sourced by a Polyakov loop. We will then consider an integrable toy model for the worldsheet that realizes such high-energy behavior.