String Theory from Maximal Supersymmetry

by Roger Morales

Thursday Jun 25, 2026, 2:30 PM → 4:00 PM Europe/Madrid

IFAE Seminar Room (In-Person)

In this talk, I will study the space of planar, maximally supersymmetric EFTs that reduce to N=4 super Yang-Mills theory at low energies. I will show that consistency under supersymmetry and tree-level factorization, together with a parity condition on the scalar amplitudes, requires the Wilson coefficients of the 4-point amplitude to obey novel nonlinear constraints. When these constraints are combined with positivity, the allowed values of the 4-point Wilson coefficients converge towards the Veneziano amplitude, finding open superstring theory as the unique answer. More broadly, our results show that higher-point amplitudes can provide new constraints on the EFT data, and that the space of consistent quantum field theories might be much smaller than previously suggested by a simple four-point analysis.