Ten Years of AdS/CFT

JOSÉ EDELSTEIN, NICOLÁS GRANDI, CARMEN NÚÑEZ, MARTÍN SCHVELLINGER

The American Physical Society

Lugar: New York; Año: 2008 p. 300

978-0-7354-0555-4

By the end of the year 1997 Juan Maldacena proposed an outstanding idea relating supergravity and gauge theories, which is known as the AdS/CFT correspondence or the gauge/gravity duality. A few months later Steven Gubser, Igor Klebanov and Alexander Polyakov, and Eduard Witten, formulated a precise definition for the generating functional of gauge theories in terms of supergravity fields based upon the Maldacena’s conjecture. During the following ten years Maldacena’s breakthrough was successfully developed in many directions, becoming perhaps the most important and influential idea in theoretical high energy physics within the last decade. The AdS/CFT correspondence is a remarkable duality that allows to deepen the understanding of gauge, gravity and string theories and the relations among them. Moreover, beyond its pure theoretical interest, a wide range of applications have been extensively investigated, including the calculation of properties of gauge theories at the strongly coupled regime, where the methods of perturbative quantum field theory are not suitable. Other than the search of the string theory dual of QCD, significant developments during these ten years include the extension of the duality to the perturbative regime of gauge theories, the search for a proof of the conjecture in the large N limit of SU(N) N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and beyond the supergravity limit in AdS3, novel applications to phenomenology of gauge theories, cosmology and condensed matter systems. With the purpose of celebrating the tenth anniversary of Maldacena’s conjecture, from 19th to 21st December 2007, the international conference “Ten Years of AdS/CFT” was held at the Campus of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Researchers who played a seminal role in the development of these ideas lectured in the Conference. Twenty five speakers delivered talks about different current directions and applications of the gauge/gravity duality for an audience of more than seventy five participants. The scientific sessions were closed by a panel integrated by professors Juan Maldacena and Igor Klebanov, who discussed together the achievements and future perspectives for the field. The aim of this volume is to make accessible to a larger audience the topics discussed during the conference. The event was closed with a session of four public lectures called “Imágenes del Universo” (“Glimpses of the Universe”) held at the University of Buenos Aires. They were delivered by professors Jorge Zanelli (CECS), Diego Harari (Instituto Balseiro), Albert De Roeck (CERN) and Juan Maldacena (IAS), and gathered more than 600 people. The conference and the public lectures were organised within the framework of the Argentinean Network for String Theory, Strings@ar. This network is integrated by more than forty researchers in the country and abroad, including colleagues from prestigious research centres and universities at Europe and the USA. We would like to express our gratitude for the generous financial support for the organisation of the conference given by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the programme Raices of the Science and Technology Secretary of the Argentinean government (SECyT), the Fundación para el Desarrollo Tecnológico (FUDETEC) of the TenarisSiderca company which is a member of the TECHINT Group, the company MICRO Automation, the Instituto Balseiro, the Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio (IAFE-CONICET), and the Instituto de Física de La Plata (IFLP-CONICET), who sponsored the conference and the public lectures. The proceedings of the conference were financed in part by the grant PIP CONICET 6332. We are grateful to all those who have contributed and assisted to the organisation of this conference. We are deeply indebted to professor Luis Alvarez-Gaumé (CERN) for scientific advise and support. In particular, we thank all speakers and participants for the very positive feedback and encouragement since the beginning. We are grateful to the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas of the University of Buenos Aires for kind hospitality for the event, as well as to the Departamento de Industrias of the University of Buenos Aires where the conference was held. We also thank the artist Augusto Zanela and professor Stanley Brodsky for providing the background images for our posters and webpages, as well as Daniel Sergnese for advise in the preparation of the posters.