STRING THEORY SEMINAR AT UNC-CH
Dmitri Khveshchenko, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Demystifying the Holographic Mystique”
Thus far, in spite of many interesting developments, the overall progress towards a systematic study and classification of the different states of strongly interacting quantum matter has been rather limited. To that end, it was argued that a recent proliferation of the ideas of holographic correspondence originating from string theory might offer a possible way out of the stalemate. However, after almost a decade of intensive attempts to extend the holographic conjecture into a variety of condensed matter problems, the validity of this intriguing approach remains largely unknown. This discussion aims at ascertaining its true (as opposed to the desired) status and elucidating the conditions under which some of its predictions might indeed be right (albeit, possibly, for a wrong reason).