Integrability and the AdS/CFT correspondence

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development of integrability in the AdS/CFT correspondence, highlighting how integrable structures have enabled exact calculations in strongly coupled gauge and string theories.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of how integrability has been applied to solve the spectral problem in AdS/CFT, advancing non-perturbative understanding.

Findings

Identification of the dilatation operator with an integrable spin chain

Explicit solutions for the spectrum of conformal dimensions

Progress in solving the string sigma model

Abstract

The description of gauge theories at strong coupling is one of the long-standing problems in theoretical physics. The idea of a relation between strongly coupled gauge theories and string theory was pioneered by 't Hooft, Wilson and Polyakov. A decade ago, Maldacena made this relation explicit by conjecturing the exact equivalence of a conformally invariant theory in four dimensions, the maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, with string theory in the AdS5 x S5 background. Other examples of correspondence between a conformally invariant theory and string theory in an AdS background were discovered recently. The comparison of the two sides of the correspondence requires the use of non-perturbative methods. The discovery of integrable structures in gauge theory and string theory led to the conjecture that the two theories are integrable for any value of the coupling constant and that they share the same integrable structure defined non-perturbatively. The last eight years brought remarkable progress in identifying this solvable model and in explicitly solving the problem of computing the spectrum of conformal dimensions of the theory. The progress came from the identification of the dilatation operator with an integrable spin chain and from the study of the string sigma model. In this thesis, I present the evolution of the concept of integrability in the framework of the AdS/CFT correspondence and the the main results obtained using this approach.