Speaker
Rajesh Gopakumar
(ICTS, Mumbai)
Description
Theories of massless higher spin gauge fields were seen as curiosities until recently. In the last decade or so these theories have played a larger role in string theory. I will give a broad overview of this subject and how the Vasiliev higher spin theory in AdS captures large N field theories in 2d and 3d. These are tractable yet nontrivial, often non-supersymmetric examples of the AdS/CFT correspondence. I shall also indicate why these theories will play a role in understanding the underlying symmetries of string theory.
