Abstract

In 1997 Juan M. Maldacena observed that certain conformal field theories were connected to gravity on the product of Anti-de Sitter spaces and other compact manifolds in one higher dimension. From this fact, a duality between d-dimensional conformal field theories and (d+1)-AdS geometries got the attention of the physics community, and a common belief that some real systems could be described in terms of a gravitational dual has gradually grown. Nowadays a more general form of the correspondence has been conjectured and a map between gauge theories at strong coupling and classical gravity has been proposed with the slogan (non)AdS/(non)CFT correspondence or holography.
In this talk I am going to focus on the main properties of the duality, reviewing some features of conformal field theories and Anti de Sitter spaces, analyzing how they can be joined in the AdS/CFT framework and how this could be applied to real systems.