Year: 1998
Type: preprint
Abstract: The correspondence between supergravity (and string theory) on $AdS$ space and boundary conformal field theory relates the thermodynamics of ${\cal N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions to the thermodynamics of Schwarzschild black holes in Anti-de Sitter space. In this description, quantum phenomena such as the spontaneous breaking of the center of the gauge group, magnetic confinement, and the mass gap are coded in classical geometry. The correspondence makes it manifest that the entropy of a very large $AdS$ Schwarzschild black hole must scale ``holographically'' with the volume of its horizon. By similar methods, one can also make a speculative proposal for the description of large $N$ gauge theories in four dimensions without supersymmetry.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Author: Witten, Edward
Institution: Institute for Advanced Study
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4309238312