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This dissertation consists of a comprehensive and pedagogical review of Maldacena's original derivation of the AdS/CFT correspondence and the main topics of string theory necessary to understand it. The large $N$ expansion of Yang-Mills…
Superstring theory, and a recent extension called M theory, are leading candidates for a quantum theory that unifies gravity with the other forces. As such, they are certainly not ordinary quantum field theories. However, recent duality…
I review motivations for the study of supersymmetric field theories by lattice techniques. In particular, some of the more interesting potential applications are described. These are models of quantum gravity, that rely on the AdS/CFT…
AdS/CFT-correspondence establishes a relationship between supersymmetric gravity (SUGRA) on Anti-de-Sitter (AdS) space and supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory which is conformaly invariant (CFT). The AdS space is the solution of the…
Currently, string theory represents the only advanced approach to a unification of all interactions, including gravity. In spite of the more than thirty years of its existence it did not make any empirically testable predictions. And it is…
We review recent progress on the resolution of gravitational singularities in string theory. The main example is the fundamental string in five dimensions which is singular in the standard supergravity description but regular after taking…
An overview is given of the way in which the unification program of particle physics has evolved into the proposal of superstring theory as a prime candidate for unifying quantum gravity with the other forces and particles of nature. A key…
Considering theories in sectors of large global charge $Q$ results in a semiclassical effective field theory (EFT) description for some strongly-coupled conformal field theories (CFTs) with continuous global symmetries. Hence, when studying…
This lecture presents a brief overview of the early history of string theory and supersymmetry. It describes how the S-matrix theory program for understanding the strong nuclear force evolved into superstring theory, which is a promising…
This article surveys some of the highlights in the development of string theory through the first superstring revolution in 1984. The emphasis is on topics in which the author was involved, especially the observation that critical string…
These are introductory lectures on the correspondence between SU(N) gauge theories and Superstring Theory in anti-de Sitter geometries (AdS). The subject combines a number of different topics, including supersymmetric field theory,…
We examine recent claims of a large set of flux compactification solutions of string theory. We conclude that the arguments for AdS solutions are plausible. The analysis of meta-stable dS solutions inevitably leads to situations where long…
In this note we expose some surprising connections between string theory and statistical inference. We consider a large collective of agents sweeping out a family of nearby statistical models for an M-dimensional manifold of statistical…
One of the main topics in the modern String Theory are the AdS/CFT dualities. Proving such conjectures is extremely difficult since the gauge and string theory perturbative regimes do not overlap. In this perspective, the discovery of…
We examine the AdS/CFT correspondence when the gauge theory is considered on a compactified space with supersymmetry breaking boundary conditions. We find that the corresponding supergravity solution has a negative energy, in agreement with…
The past few years have witnessed a remarkable crossover of string theoretical ideas from the abstract world of geometrical forms to the concrete experimental realm of condensed matter physics. The basis for this --- variously known as…
We show how some features of the AdS/CFT correspondence for AdS_3 can easily be understood via standard world-sheet methods and 2d gravity like scaling arguments. To do this, we propose a stringy way for perturbing two-dimensional CFT's…
In this talk I review recent developments in superstring theory. In the first half of the talk I discuss some of the earlier developments in this subject. This includes a review of the status of string theory as a unified theory of gravity…
This talk begins with some history and basic facts about string theory and its connections with strong interactions. Comparisons of stacks of Dirichlet branes with curved backgrounds produced by them are used to motivate the AdS/CFT…
This is the written version of a short talk given at the University of Leipzig in December 1998. It reviews some general aspects of string theory from the viewpoint of the search for an unifying theory. Here, special emphasis lies on the…