Precision matching of circular Wilson loops and strings in AdS(5)xS(5)

Authors: Daniel Medina-Rincon, Arkady A. Tseytlin and Konstantin Zarembo     Preprint number: UUITP-15/18 Previous   attempts  to match the exact N=4  super Yang-Mills expression for the expectation value of the 1/2-BPS circular Wilson loop with the semiclassical AdS(5)xS(5) string theory prediction were not successful  at the first subleading order. There was a missing prefactor lambda^(-3/4) which could be attributed to the unknown normalization of the string path integral measure. Here we resolve this problem by computing, following arXiv:1712.07730, the ratio of the string partition functions corresponding to the circular Wilson loop and the special 1/4-supersymmetric latitude Wilson loop. The fact that the latter has a trivial expectation value in the gauge theory allows us to relate the prefactor to the contribution of the three zero modes  of the ``transverse" fluctuation operator in the 5-sphere directions.