The holographic approach to non-perturbative QCD and baryon physics – Lecture 2

The Gauge/Gravity duality introduced a new tool for investigating QFTs in non perturbative regimes: the most phenomenologically relevant example of these theories is QCD at low energy (at the scale of nuclear physics), whose spectrum of bound states ranges from glueballs, to mesons, to complicated atomic nuclei. In these lectures we will review the Gauge/Gravity duality and discuss its extension to (almost) QCD, illustrating the top-down model of Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto: we will show the emergence of baryons from the model, and how to use it to compute observables that can prove themselves challenging via other techniques.