Does Yang-Mills theory describe quantum gravity?

TL;DR

This paper tests the gauge/gravity duality conjecture by comparing super Yang-Mills theory and superstring theory at finite temperature, finding strong agreement that supports the idea of Yang-Mills theory as a nonperturbative quantum gravity formulation.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative test of the gauge/gravity duality at finite temperature, supporting super Yang-Mills theory as a nonperturbative quantum gravity framework.

Findings

Good agreement between super Yang-Mills and superstring theory results.

Supports the gauge/gravity duality conjecture.

Suggests super Yang-Mills theory describes quantum gravity nonperturbatively.

Abstract

The strongest version of the gauge/gravity duality conjecture relates the 1/N correction in super Yang-Mills theory and the quantum correction in superstring theory. We perform a quantitative test of this conjecture at finite temperature, by studying the D0-brane matrix quantum mechanics and the black zero-brane in type IIA superstring theory. We find good agreement, which strongly suggests that the super Yang-Mills theory does provide us with a nonperturbative formulation of quantum gravity through the gauge/gravity duality.