Bootstrapping $\mathcal{N}=4$ super-Yang-Mills on the conformal manifold

Abstract

We combine supersymmetric localization results with numerical bootstrap techniques to compute upper bounds on the low-lying CFT data of ${\cal N} = 4$ super-Yang-Mills theory as a function of the complexified gauge coupling $\tau$. In particular, from the stress tensor multiplet four-point function, we extract the scaling dimension of the lowest-lying unprotected scalar operator and its OPE coefficient. While our method can be applied in principle to any gauge group $G$, we focus on $G = SU(2)$ and $SU(3)$ for simplicity. At weak coupling, the upper bounds we find are very close to the corresponding four-loop results. We also give preliminary evidence that these upper bounds become small islands under reasonable assumptions.