IAS Physics Group Meeting

Abstract: I will begin by reviewing gauge/string duality, and in particular the motivations for understanding this duality better in the case of weakly coupled gauge theories. I will then discuss work in progress on two approaches to understanding this duality better in the case of two dimensional adjoint QCD, which is weakly coupled when the adjoint masses are much larger than the gauge coupling. The first approach uses perturbation theory to obtain an effective stringy description of the high-energy states. The second approach starts from finding a good worldsheet description for the string dual to the two dimensional pure Yang-Mills theory, such that one can then add to it boundaries (quarks in the fundamental representation) or extra particles on the worldsheet (adjoint matter fields).