#1079 overall
Leonard Susskind lectures on AdS/CFT
YouTube
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2018 · score 0.7
A set of public YouTube lectures by physicist Leonard Susskind introducing the AdS/CFT correspondence, the proposed duality between anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theories. The lectures are aimed at a general audience rather than requiring graduate mathematics.
One commenter recommends them as the math-free option that is easy to watch and avoids nonsense, since most popular AdS/CFT material is poor.
Science & Engineeringbeginnerfreevideo lectures#ads/cfd correspondence#holography#string theory#quantum field theory#susskind
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Since you asked for more depth, I'll focus on the (comparatively easier) task of giving some links to technical literature. First of all, if you already have a traditional QFT background, there's the two extremes of either just taking a simple toy example to play with [1] or a fairly rigorous well written lecture course [2]. For a more general physics/math background I'd recommend a slightly more pedagogical treatment [3], but it's still accurate to the subject matter and therefore contains graduate level mathematics. There's a lot more out there, but these are just some of the descriptions I've personally skimmed and found them to be well written and useful.
On the other end of the scale, there's a huge amount of popular documentaries out there that purport to say something about AdS/CFT. Most of them either contain nonsense or don't say very much at all. I don't really know how useful the popular analogies really are, but in the spirit of making at least one recommendation that doesn't contain any math, Susskind's public lectures are easy to watch (here's one [4]), and Susskind is careful not to talk nonsense.
There isn't really much on AdS/CFT that's in between graduate level mathematics and math-less popular stuff. The reason is that it's a fairly irreducible concept in the sense that you really need to understand what an anti-de Sitter space is and how conformal field theories work to see why there's a mathematical correspondence between them, and this isn't truly analogous to anything simpler. That's why it's very hard to explain beyond the level of vague metaphors without being rigorous about it.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0403110.pdf
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.pdf
[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4319.pdf
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY