String theory, quantum field theory and gauge/gravity duality

弦理论、量子场论和规范/重力对偶性

• 批准号: 170113223
• 负责人: Dr. Tristan McLoughlin
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Abteilung Quantengravitation und vereinheitlichte Theorien
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2009-12-31 至 2012-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/170113223?language=en
• 关键词: String; theory; quantum; field; gauge

Much of the structure of the world around us and its interactions – the rigidity of the chair beneath us, the light we see or indeed why the stars give off that very light – is currently understood in the terms of quantum theories of gauge fields. As these theories have been highly tested by experiment we have a great deal of confidence that they are correct, at least in their regimes of applicability. However the theoretical tools we have to analyse them, particularly when the interactions are strong, are limited and profound open questions remain. One very novel approach to these problems, which is at the heart of my research, is the remarkable duality between certain quantum theories of gravity and gauge theories. The most studied example has, on the one side, strings moving in the curved space-time AdS5×S5 and is conjectured to be dual to four dimensional N = 4 super-Yang-Mills. This theory though not the same as the gauge theory that describes the strong force shares many of its features. These two theories are dual in that every measurable object in one theory has an alternative, but equivalent, description in the other theory, although the relationship between these can be extremely non-obvious. Most excitingly the duality relates the weakly interacting regime of one theory to the strongly coupled regime of the dual theory. While this makes proving the duality rather difficult, it means that we can understand strongly interacting gauge theories by considering weakly interacting string theories and just as interesting, it implies we can describe theories of quantum gravity by gauge theories. It is the aim of this project to study this duality and make use of the insights gleaned to better understand the physics of both gauge theories and quantum gravity. More specifically, one recent discovery is that examples of this duality seem to be integrable, that is to say they possess an infinite number of conserved quantities, which makes calculational problems much more tractable and may make it possible to actually prove the duality in certain limits. In the proposed project the origin and structure of this integrability is to be considered with an eye to developing tools to calculate interesting observables at all values of the coupling. Furthermore, the methods and results will be generalized towards other, more phenomenologically relevant, theories.

目前在规格场的量子理论的术语中理解了我们周围世界的大部分结构及其相互作用 - 我们下面的椅子的刚度，我们看到的光或为什么恒星散发出非常光。由于这些理论已经通过实验进行了高度检验，因此至少在适用性的制度中，我们充满信心它们是正确的。但是，我们必须分析它们的理论工具，尤其是在互动很强的情况下，仍然存在有限的开放问题。解决这些问题的一种非常新颖的方法，这是我研究的核心，是某些重力和衡量理论之间的显着二元性。在一侧，最具研究的示例是在弯曲的时空ADS5×S5中移动的字符串，并猜想是双二维n = 4个Super-Yang-Mills。该理论虽然与描述强力具有许多特征的量规理论不同。这两种理论是双重的，因为一个理论中的每个可测量对象在另一个理论中都有一种替代性但同等的描述，尽管这些理论之间的关系可能非常明显。最令人兴奋的是，二元性将一种理论的弱相互作用态度与双重理论的强烈耦合方向联系起来。尽管这使二元性非常困难，但这意味着我们可以通过考虑该项目的目的来研究这种二元性并利用收集的见解来更好地理解量规理论和量子引力的物理学。更具体地说，最近的一个发现是这种二元性的示例似乎是可以整合的，也就是说，它们拥有无限数量的保守数量，这使得计算问题更加可行，并且可能使在某些限制下实际证明二元性成为可能。在拟议的项目中，该集成的原点和结构应着眼于开发工具以计算耦合的所有值的有趣可观察物。此外，这些方法和结果将推广到其他更现象的理论。