Juan Maldacena (Institute for Advanced Study)

Juan Maldacena is one of the most brilliant and profound young researchers in string theory, with many important contributions in the study of gravitational interactions at the quantum level. As a consequence of several investigations on black holes in string theory, in 1998 he proposed an unexpected equivalence between a string theory in a five-dimensional curved space-time (known as anti-deSitter geometry) and a quantum gauge field theory in four dimensions. This revolutionary proposal, known as the Maldacena correspondence, is the most explicit realization of the holographic principle (which suggests to describe the degrees of freedom of a gravitational theory in terms of a theory without gravitation living on a space with one dimension less). The holographic principle, and thus the Maldacena conjecture, constitutes a crucial avenue to the understanding of the quantum behaviour of black holes, and hence of quantum gravity. In a similarly surprising way, the Maldacena conjecture provides new tools to study the strong coupling regime of certain quantum field theories (like QCD, the theory of strong interactions) using a dual gravitational system. These insight have a natural application to the study of the quark-gluon plasma, obtained in heavy ion collisions at the RHIC experiment in Brookhaven, USA, and in the near future at the LHC at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Juan Maldacena is a very nice speaker, able to explain his deep ideas in a way accesible to the general public. His participation in the general public lectures of the Strings 2007 conference is a real pleasure for us.

Some links with additional information about Juan Maldacena

• Juan Maldacena in Wikipedia
• Juan Maldacena in Big Thinkers