Towards an AdS/WZW correspondence

by Vasilis Niarchos

Tuesday 22 Mar 2011, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

I will discuss a recent attempt to formulate the AdS3 holographic dual of 2d WZW models. These are well known solvable 2d CFTs that admit interesting large-N limits. Using exact information about their spectrum and correlation functions in generic regimes of parameter space we can probe questions that are typically hard to address in higher dimensional cases. We identify a regime where a holographic dual on a weakly curved spacetime seems possible and demonstrate that this dual involves a large-N gauge theory on AdS3. A weak-strong field theory duality between the WZW model and a 2d QCD-like gauge theory plays an important role in our discussion.