The gauge/gravity duality

 

 

Diego Trancanelli

 

Instituto de Física

Universidade de São Paulo

 

 

Dualities are among the most powerful tools in theoretical physics. They are useful as they sometimes allow to map a difficult problem on one side of the duality to a more tractable but equivalent problem on the other side. In this seminar I will introduce and motivate heuristically a celebrated duality (a.k.a. AdS/CFT correspondence) between theories of quantum fields (with no gravity) and theories of gravity (and strings). This gauge/gravity duality has shed light into many aspects of various physical systems, ranging from strongly coupled nuclear plasmas and condensed matter materials to quantum black holes. I will try to keep the talk self-contained, (almost) no knowledge of quantum field theory is required.