Week 25.01.2015 – 31.01.2015

I will review the link between 1+p dimensional maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills and the black hole thermodynamics of Dp-branes via the gauge/string correspondence. The finite temperature behaviour of Dp-brane supergravity black holes looks very alien from the perspective of the dual strongly coupled Yang-Mills. However, I will argue that in a natural set of Yang-Mills variables, the classical moduli (which unfortunately are still strongly coupled), certain features of these thermodynamics become quite transparent.

I'll revisit some old of ideas of Euclidean quantum gravity, in which manifolds of different topology are summed in the path integral. I'll show that, in certain circumstances, gravitational instantons can destabilise supersymmetric Kaluza-Klein compactifications. We'll also see how one-loop divergences in quantum gravity can be subsumed into a new RG-invariant topological scale.

I will review how integrability can be used to understand the spectral problem (including massless modes) of Type IIB string theory on AdS3 x S3 x T4 with R-R flux. I will then show how integrability emerges in the dual CFT2. This provides arguably the first non-BPS test of the planar AdS3/CFT2 correspondence in the literature and gives strong evidence in identifying particular points in the moduli space of the dual theories.

In this talk we will discuss the collective field theory approach towards understanding the holographic duality between Vasiliev's minimal higher spin theory in AdS4 and the free O(N) vector model in 2+1 dimensions.