Physical Society Colloquium

Interview for Faculty Position

String/gauge-theory duality and ferromagnetic spin chains

Martin Kruczenski

Princeton University

It has long been suspected that strings play a role in understanding the low energy limit of non-abelian gauge theories and in particular in describing hadrons as bound states of quarks and gluons. In this talk I am going to describe recent developments in that direction.First, in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, I am going to show how, in certain gauge theories, one can use strings to compute the energy of quark bound states. Although the calculations are straight-forward, the concepts behind them are still obscure. So, in the rest of the talk I will look for a deeper understanding of the link between gauge theory and string theory. Suprinsingly, the ferromagnetic Heisenberg chain appears in a central role: on one hand it arises naturally in the field theory and on the other, it can be seen that its low energy excitations (spin waves) can be interpreted as strings.