Towards the Virasoro-Shapiro Amplitude in AdS5xS5

Abstract: We propose a systematic procedure for obtaining all single trace 1/2-BPS correlators in N=4 super Yang-Mills corresponding to the four-point tree-level amplitude for type IIB string theory in AdS5xS5. The underlying idea is to compute generalised contact Witten diagrams coming from a 10d effective field theory on AdS5xS5 whose coefficients are fixed by the flat space Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude up to ambiguities related to commutators of the 10d covariant derivatives which require additional information such as localisation. We illustrate this procedure by computing stringy corrections to the supergravity prediction for all single trace 1/2-BPS correlators up to $O(\alpha'^7)$, and spell out a general algorithm for extending this to any order in $\alpha'$.