On the cusp anomalous dimension in the ladder limit of mathcal N=4 SYM

We analyze the cusp anomalous dimension in the (leading) ladder limit of $\mathcal N=4$ SYM and present new results for its higher-order perturbative expansion. We study two different limits with respect to the cusp angle $\phi$. The first is the light-like regime where $x = e^{i\,\phi}\to 0$. This limit is characterised by a non-trivial expansion of the cusp anomaly as a sum of powers of $\log x$, where the maximum exponent increases with the loop order. The coefficients of this expansion have remarkable transcendentality features and can be expressed by products of single zeta values. We show that the whole logarithmic expansion is fully captured by a solvable Woods-Saxon like one-dimensional potential. From the exact solution, we extract generating functions for the cusp anomaly as well as for the various specific transcendental structures appearing therein. The second limit that we discuss is the regime of small cusp angle. In this somewhat simpler case, we show how to organise the quantum mechanical perturbation theory in a novel efficient way by means of a suitable all-order Ansatz for the ground state of the associated Schr\"odinger problem. Our perturbative setup allows to systematically derive higher-order perturbative corrections in powers of the cusp angle as explicit non-perturbative functions of the effective coupling. This series approximation is compared with the numerical solution of the Schr\"odinger equation to show that we can achieve very good accuracy over the whole range of coupling and cusp angle. Our results have been obtained by relatively simple techniques. Nevertheless, they provide several non-trivial tests useful to check the application of Quantum Spectral Curve methods to the ladder approximation at non zero $\phi$, in the two limits we studied.