Using the Language of Quantum Mechanics to Explain Holographic Duality

Author / Creator

AAPT SM21 (2021)

Conferences

AAPT SM21 PS.A-SA-04: Explaining Frontiers & Modern Technology (2021)

Available as

Online

Summary

Holographic duality represents a revolutionary new way to tackle strongly coupled systems like QCD at low energies, where quarks and gluons clump into "hadrons", like protons and neutrons. The dual...

Holographic duality represents a revolutionary new way to tackle strongly coupled systems like QCD at low energies, where quarks and gluons clump into "hadrons", like protons and neutrons. The duality posits that low-energy QCD is equivalent to a weakly coupled system in a curved high-dimensional spacetime, where we can use standard perturbative techniques to make predictions for quantities like meson masses and couplings. While the original formulation of the duality relies on string theory, many techniques derived from it can be boiled down into problems readily accessible to undergraduates. In this talk, we show that finding the hadron spectrum using holographic duality amounts to solving a one-dimensional Schroedinger equation, where the structure of the 5D curved space is encoded in the Schroedinger potential.

Show More