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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lévy, Thierry
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08509
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author Lévy, Thierry
author_facet Lévy, Thierry
contents We give an almost purely combinatorial expression for Wilson loop expectations of the Yang-Mills holonomy process with values in the unitary group on a compact oriented surface, possibly with boundary and arbitrary boundary conditions. Our main result computes the non-normalized expectation of products of traces of holonomies along an arbitrary family of immersed curves with transverse self-intersections and no triple points. It is expressed as a sum over assignments of highest weights of the unitary group to the connected components of the complement of the curves. Each term is a product of a Gaussian exponential factor, dimensions of unitary representations, and local contributions at the intersection points given by the sine or cosine of an angle determined by the surrounding highest weights. As an application, we obtain a new and short proof of the Makeenko-Migdal equations on arbitrary compact surfaces.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_08509
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A combinatorial formula for Wilson loop expectations on compact surfaces
Lévy, Thierry
Probability
81T13, 05E10
We give an almost purely combinatorial expression for Wilson loop expectations of the Yang-Mills holonomy process with values in the unitary group on a compact oriented surface, possibly with boundary and arbitrary boundary conditions. Our main result computes the non-normalized expectation of products of traces of holonomies along an arbitrary family of immersed curves with transverse self-intersections and no triple points. It is expressed as a sum over assignments of highest weights of the unitary group to the connected components of the complement of the curves. Each term is a product of a Gaussian exponential factor, dimensions of unitary representations, and local contributions at the intersection points given by the sine or cosine of an angle determined by the surrounding highest weights. As an application, we obtain a new and short proof of the Makeenko-Migdal equations on arbitrary compact surfaces.
title A combinatorial formula for Wilson loop expectations on compact surfaces
topic Probability
81T13, 05E10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08509