The Back-to-Back Plateau of the Energy-Energy Correlator from Weak to Strong Coupling

Abstract

The back-to-back limit of the energy-energy correlator (EEC) exhibits a finite plateau, capturing the evolution from perturbative soft-collinear radiation at weak coupling to string dynamics at strong coupling. At weak coupling, we resum its leading and next-to-leading-power logarithms through N${}^3$LL in $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM, including non-planar contributions. Combining this weak-coupling endpoint with bootstrap and strong-coupling data, we construct an interpolation for the plateau height from weak to strong coupling. The calculation uses a human-in-the-loop agentic workflow.

arXiv comment12 pages, 4 figures