Princeton University Department of Physics Donald R. Hamilton Colloquium Series

Higher-spin gravity is a generalization of Einstein's general relativity, which involves towers of interacting massless fields of arbitrarily high spin. It has an infinite dimensional higher-spin gauge symmetry, and can be consistently constructed in the presence of a non-zero cosmological constant. I will give an overview of higher-spin gravity theories, with a focus on their role in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, a remarkable "holographic" duality between quantum gravity in anti-de Sitter (AdS) space and conformal field theory (CFT) in one less dimension. Higher-spin theories provide dual gravitational descriptions of some classic field theoretical models, such as the Wilson-Fisher fixed point of the O(N) vector model, and the Gross-Neveu model. Generalizations of the higher-spin AdS/CFT correspondence, which involve the Chern-Simons gauge theory, have suggested new boson-fermion dualities in two spatial dimensions.