3 ms·

Off topic, but can you recommend any resources for getting into the subject of AdS/CFT correspondence? I’m loosely familiar with it, but I’d love more depth. Th

Off topic, but can you recommend any resources for getting into the subject of AdS/CFT correspondence? I’m loosely familiar with it, but I’d love more depth. Thanks for any links or hints!

keldaris 9y ago
Since you asked for more depth, I'll focus on the (comparatively easier) task of giving some links to technical literature. First of all, if you already have a traditional QFT background, there's the two extremes of either just taking a simple toy example to play with [1] or a fairly rigorous well written lecture course [2]. For a more general physics/math background I'd recommend a slightly more pedagogical treatment [3], but it's still accurate to the subject matter and therefore contains graduate level mathematics. There's a lot more out there, but these are just some of the descriptions I've personally skimmed and found them to be well written and useful. On the other end of the scale, there's a huge amount of popular documentaries out there that purport to say something about AdS/CFT. Most of them either contain nonsense or don't say very much at all. I don't really know how useful the popular analogies really are, but in the spirit of making at least one recommendation that doesn't contain any math, Susskind's public lectures are easy to watch (here's one [4]), and Susskind is careful not to talk nonsense. There isn't really much on AdS/CFT that's in between graduate level mathematics and math-less popular stuff. The reason is that it's a fairly irreducible concept in the sense that you really need to understand what an anti-de Sitter space is and how conformal field theories work to see why there's a mathematical correspondence between them, and this isn't truly analogous to anything simpler. That's why it's very hard to explain beyond the level of vague metaphors without being rigorous about it. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0403110.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0403110.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4319.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4319.pdf [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY
- QAPereo 9y ago
  This is precisely what I was hoping for, and I just cannot thank you enough for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate you giving me a full range of resources too.
  - keldaris 9y ago
    Glad I could help! AdS/CFT is a very elegant idea in modern physics, I hope you enjoy studying it.

Off topic, but can you recommend any resources for getting into the subject of AdS/CFT correspondence? I’m loosely familiar with it, but I’d love more depth. Thanks for any links or hints!

keldaris 9y ago

Since you asked for more depth, I'll focus on the (comparatively easier) task of giving some links to technical literature. First of all, if you already have a traditional QFT background, there's the two extremes of either just taking a simple toy example to play with [1] or a fairly rigorous well written lecture course [2]. For a more general physics/math background I'd recommend a slightly more pedagogical treatment [3], but it's still accurate to the subject matter and therefore contains graduate level mathematics. There's a lot more out there, but these are just some of the descriptions I've personally skimmed and found them to be well written and useful. On the other end of the scale, there's a huge amount of popular documentaries out there that purport to say something about AdS/CFT. Most of them either contain nonsense or don't say very much at all. I don't really know how useful the popular analogies really are, but in the spirit of making at least one recommendation that doesn't contain any math, Susskind's public lectures are easy to watch (here's one [4]), and Susskind is careful not to talk nonsense. There isn't really much on AdS/CFT that's in between graduate level mathematics and math-less popular stuff. The reason is that it's a fairly irreducible concept in the sense that you really need to understand what an anti-de Sitter space is and how conformal field theories work to see why there's a mathematical correspondence between them, and this isn't truly analogous to anything simpler. That's why it's very hard to explain beyond the level of vague metaphors without being rigorous about it. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0403110.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0403110.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4319.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4319.pdf [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY

QAPereo 9y ago
This is precisely what I was hoping for, and I just cannot thank you enough for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate you giving me a full range of resources too.
- keldaris 9y ago
  Glad I could help! AdS/CFT is a very elegant idea in modern physics, I hope you enjoy studying it.