Seminar series
Date
Mon, 18 Nov 2013
Time
12:00 -
13:00
Location
L5
Speaker
Nadav Drukker
Organisation
Kings College, London
N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills is probably the simplest interacting quantum field theory in four dimensions. Likewise its gravity dual:AdS_5 x S^5 is one of the simplest string theory backgrounds. This string background is much harder to study than flat space since the spectrum is not given by free oscillators, yet it is integrable, meaning that there is an infinite number of conserved charges on the world-sheet. Over the past 10 or so years the tools of integrability have been developed and applied to study this theory. In my talk I will present two recent applications of these tools to the study of the spectrum of open strings. The first problem is the potential between charged particles - the N=4 analogues of a quark and an antiquark. The second is the ground state of an open string stretched between a D-brane and an anti D-brane which is the tachyon of perturbative (non SUSY) string theory. My talk will be geared to a general theoretical physics audience and will not dwell too much on the technicalities of the integrable model, which are rather involved and will try to focus mainly on the observables we study and the results we learnt about them.