Strong Interactions, Color Confinement, and Strings

ABSTRACT
In the 1950s and 60s many strongly interacting particles were discovered. String theory was originally invented to describe them, but Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) emerged as the precise theory of the strong nuclear force. A quarter century later it was understood that string theory and certain gauge theories akin to QCD are different descriptions of the same physics. I will review the relations between gauge theories and strings. Their formation in QCD is a manifestation of the confinement of colored quarks and gluons. While the color confinement is observed numerically using Lattice Gauge Theory, its analytic proof remains a deep unsolved problem in theoretical physics. I will conclude by discussing some surprises in lower-dimensional models.
BIO
Igor Klebanov is Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University, where he has been a faculty member since 1989, and the Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010, a prestigious prizes from the University of La Sapienza in Rome in 2014 and the Pomeranchuk Prize from ITEP Moscow in 2017. Much of his work has focused on the exact relations between quantum field theories in four and three space-time dimensions, and higher dimensional theories which include gravity.

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