Thursday, November 21, 2002
Marcus Spradlin, (Princeton University),
Superstring Interactions in a plane wave background

A recently discovered limit of the AdS/CFT correspondence relates string theory in a plane wave background to a certain sector of supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theory. Light-cone string field theory is used to calculate matrix elements of the interacting string theory in this background, and the results agree with perturbative gauge theory calculations. This provides strong evidence for an effectively perturbative duality between a conformal field theory and a full interacting string theory --- a significant advance over the familiar AdS5xS5 duality, where one is usually restricted to the supergravity approximation on the string theory side.