Four-point correlators with BPS bound states in AdS3 and AdS5

A bstract We consider heavy-heavy-light-light (HHLL) correlators in AdS/CFT, focussing on the D1D5 CFT 2 and the $$ \mathcal{N} $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:math> = 4 super Yang-Mills theory. Out of the lightest 1/2-BPS operator in the spectrum, O , we construct a particular heavy operator O H given by a coherent superposition of multi-particle operators O n , and study the HHLL correlator. When n is of order of the central charge, we show that the bulk equation that computes our boundary HHLL correlators is always a Heun equation. By assuming that the form of the correlator can be continued to the regime where n is 𝒪(1), we first reproduce the known single-particle four-point correlators for n = 1 and then predict new results for the multi-particle correlators 〈 O n O n OO 〉. Explicit expressions can be written entirely in terms of n -loop ladder integrals and their derivatives, and we provide them for n = 2 and n = 3 both in position and in Mellin space. Focussing on the AdS 5 case, we study the OPE expansion of these multi-particle correlators and show that several consistency relations with known CFT data are non-trivially satisfied. Finally, we extract new CFT data for double and triple-particle long operators.