Hirsohi Ooguri
Professor of Physics
Caltech
 

String theory is a unique candidate for the unified theory of
forces and matter including gravity. It has all the ingredients
that are necessary to describe particle physics phenomena and
it is the only known quantum theory of gravity with well-defined
perturbative expansion. Recently powerful techniques have been
developed to study string theory beyond the coupling constant
expansion. I will focus one of them --- the AdS/CFT correspondence,
which is an explicit realization of the holography of quantum gravity.
It transforms traditional mysteries of quantum gravity (such as
counting of quantum states of black hole) into well-defined problems
in quantum field theories. It also turns difficult dynamical problems
of gauge theories in various dimensions (such as quark confinement
in QCD in four dimensions) into problems on two-dimensional
worldsheet of string. I will discuss lessons we have learned about
gauge theories and string theory from this recent development