Guage fields, strings and gravity

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The most fascinating and important discovery of the superstring duality revolution of the 1990's was a concrete realization of the long-conjectured duality between gauge field theory and string theory. It asserts an exact mapping between maximally supersymmetric gauge theory in four dimensions and string theory in a particular ten-dimensional spacetime geometry. Gauge field theories will forever be an important part of physics. They are the constituents of the `Standard Model' of elementary particles and describe phenomena seen in particle physics experiments at presently accessible energy scales, some to incredible accuracy. That these gauge fields might have an alternative description as string theories is an idea with far-reaching consequences. At a practical level, it could yield new analytical tools which would help to better understand gauge field theories and make quantitative predictions in regimes which are inaccessible to currently known techniques. It has already provided considerable intuition about the behavior of gauge theories in the strong coupling regime, where their non-linearities are large and the usual technique, perturbation theory cannot be applied. This research program will study the implications of the duality betweeen gauge fields and strings, both at a formal level to better understand its structure in the one known explicit example, and at a practical level, to learn how to use it as a quantitative tool for the analysis of realistic gauge theories. Specific projects explore the structure of AdS/CFT using highly symmetric states, the spectra of gauge theory operators using integrability and classical solutions of string theory and studies of matrix quantum mechanics using the techniques of lattice gauge theory.