Yang-Mills Flux Tube in AdS II: Effective String Theory

Abstract

We continue the study of flux tubes in confining gauge theories placed in a rigid AdS background, focusing on the three-dimensional case. Our analysis is performed in the large-radius regime, where effective string theory provides a good approximation of the dynamics. Using a combination of techniques, primarily the analytic transcendentality ansatz bootstrap, we compute observables up to two-loop order in the expansion in powers of the string length over the AdS radius, which constitutes the main result of this work. Finally, we employ Pad\'e resummations to explore the possible compatibility of our results with a smooth interpolation of observables between large-radius AdS and small-radius AdS, in which gauge theory is weakly coupled.