Illuminating strongly coupled field theories with black holes Shamit Kachru, Permanent member of KITP and Visiting Professor, UCSB, and Stanford University (on leave)

In this talk, I describe how a new principle of physics, holography, allows us to relate quantum gravity theories in D dimensions to conventional field theories in D-1 dimensions. The simplest and most explicit examples relate relativistic field theories to gravity in anti de Sitter spacetimes. This duality between gravity and field theory is now being used to extensively investigate toy models of QCD and strongly correlated condensed matter systems. I describe some of the most interesting results (flowing in both directions) which have emerged from these studies.