SU(N) gauge theories and the bosonic string

by Martin LÜSCHER (CERN-TH)

Thursday 5 Dec 2002, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

It is an old conjecture, first put forward by Nambu in 1979, that the expectation values of Wilson loops in SU($N$) gauge theories are matched by the corresponding amplitudes of a bosonic string theory. The proposition leads to a number of predictions for the large distance behaviour of the static quark potential, the Polyakov loop correlation function and related quantities. Some of these have now been confirmed in lattice gauge theory, using recent advances in numerical simulation techniques. In particular, the central charge of the effective world-sheet field theory is found to coincide with the lattice results at a few per cent level.