AST · Aspects of string Theory

Final Activity and Management Report Summary - AST (Aspects of String Theory)

String/M-theory is perhaps the most solid candidate for a quantum description of gravity, and thus has a priori the ingredients for a unified description of Nature. As such, it incorporates in a natural way the holographic principle, whose star realisation is the AdS/CFT correspondence. This correspondence allows us to understand aspects of gauge theories at strong coupling in terms of classical gravitational backgrounds, and this has many potential applications. The particular case of 3d gauge theories represents a very interesting case, both because of purely theoretical considerations and also because of the possible applications to real systems such as 2nd order phase transitions or quantum Hall effect. However, finding the dual field theories has been a challenge up to very recently. In particular, in our project we focused in some such aspects. We proposed a candidate for maximally supersymmetric gauge theory as dual to AdS_4xS^7 which attracted a lot of attention. We also studied less supersymmetric backgrounds, providing an explicit candidate for a dual to a generalised M-theory conifold known as Q111. We also studied important aspects of these theories such as their global baryonic symmetries. These symmetries are very important since they allow to classify the particle spectrum. Furthermore, they provide global symmetries which can experience spontaneous symmetry breaking, thus providing candidates for strongly coupled 2nd order phase transitions. Indeed, another side of our project looked at such models from a more bottom-up approach, that is, asking for the phenomenologically relevant ingredients to the description of the desired systems. By a relevant choice of the interactions we were able to model, from a phenomenological perspective, strongly coupled phase transitions in different universality classes.

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