Princeton University Princeton Center for Theorectical Science Symposium - AdS/CFT: New Developments and Applications: 2009-2010 - Day 1

The Princeton Center for Theoretical Science will host a program: "AdS/CFT: New Developments and Applications: 2009-2010." The program will consist of two symposium, one in Fall, 2009 and one in Spring 2010. Organizers: Steven Gubser, Chris Herzog, Igor Klebanov, Thomas Klose and Amos Yarom. The AdS/CFT correspondence is one of the most interesting developments to come out of string theory. It maps the physics of strongly interacting field theories to a dual classical gravitational description. Such a duality has led to a better understanding of both string theory and strongly coupled conformal field theories. This program aims to discuss both new, more formal, aspects of the duality involving M2 branes (the 2+1 dimensional fundamental objects of M-theory) which have been developed over the last two years, alongside various novel applications of the duality to condensed matter systems, hydrodynamics and heavy ion collisions. The former developments provide for gauge theory duals to stacks of M2-branes and hence in principle allow for a quantitative study of the still mysterious M- theory. The latter applications have been surprisingly successful in understanding features such as the low viscosity of the quark gluon plasma created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven and its opacity to energetic heavy quarks. Hopefully, similar usage of the AdS/CFT duality can be made for solid- state systems. For the program and to register, please visit: http://pcts.princeton.edu/pcts/adscft/adscft.html .