A toy model of Polyakov duality

Polyakov has conjectured that Yang-Mills theory should be equivalent to a noncritical string theory. I pointed out, based on the work of Marchesini, Ishibashi, Kawai and collaborators, and Jevicki and Rodrigues, that the loop operator of the Yang-Mills theory is the temporal gauge string field theory Hamiltonian of a noncritical string theory. In the present note I explicitly show how this works for the one--plaquette model, providing a consistent direct string interpretation of the unitary matrix model for the first time.