（ABSTRACT）

In 2007, Alday and Maldacena proposed a novel duality between gluon scattering amplitudes and light-like polygonal Wilson loops in the N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. Their proposal suggests that one can compute gluon scattering amplitudes at strong coupling by considering minimal surfaces in AdS space via the AdS/CFT correspondence.
In this seminar, I will explain how to compute the minimal surface with a light-like polygonal boundary in AdS space. Surprisingly, such a minimal surface problem is related to the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz (TBA) method for certain 2d integrable field theories, and the TBA approach enables us to compute the minimal surface without constructing explicit string solutions.

Reference:
Y. Hatsuda, K. Ito, K. Sakai and Y. Satoh, JHEP 1004 (2010) 108, arXiv:1002.2941 [hep-th].