dr Marcin Piątek

The AdS/CFT Correspondence and its Applications; Part I: An intro to the Maldacena's duality

The AdS/CFT correspondence is one of the most significant results that string theory has produced. It refers to the existence of amazing dualities between theories with gravity and theories without gravity, and is also sometimes referred to as the gauge theory/gravity correspondence. The prototype example of such correspondence, as originally conjectured by Maldacena, is the exact equivalence between type IIB string theory compactified on 5-dimensional anti-de Siter space * 5-dimensional sphere, and 4-dimensional conformal N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. The AdS/CFT correspondence is an example of a weak/strong coupling duality and can be use as a tool to study strongly interacted gauge theories or non-perturbative stringy physics. Another particularly fascinating aspect of the AdS/CFT correspondence is that it is a concrete realization of a Holographic Principle, which states that there should be a lower dimensional non-gravitational representation of degrees of freedom of any quantum theory of gravity. In this talk, which is a second part of a three-part seminar devoted to the AdS/CFT correspondence and its applications, we give a brief introduction to the Maldacena's duality, describe some tests, and mention some resent developments.