The string/gauge theory correspondence in QCD

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development of string/gauge theory duality in QCD, highlighting how string descriptions now enable concrete calculations of strongly coupled phenomena like confinement and chiral symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It summarizes recent advances in applying string/gauge duality to realistic gauge theories, providing new computational tools and insights into non-perturbative QCD phenomena.

Findings

String dualities offer calculable models of confinement.

String descriptions elucidate chiral symmetry breaking.

Applications include modeling quark-gluon plasma and hadronization.

Abstract

Ideas about a duality between gauge fields and strings have been around for many decades. During the last ten years, these ideas have taken a much more concrete mathematical form. String descriptions of the strongly coupled dynamics of semi-realistic gauge theories, exhibiting confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, are now available. These provide remarkably simple ways to compute properties of the strongly coupled quark-gluon fluid phase, and also shed new light on various phenomenological models of hadron fragmentation. We present a review and highlight some exciting recent developments.