This concept was studied in the 1870s by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who showed that the thermodynamic properties of a gas could be derived from the combined properties of its many constituent molecules.
Despite much work on these problems, it is not known to what extent string theory describes the real world or how much freedom the theory allows in the choice of its details. String theory was first studied in the late 1960s as a theory of the strong nuclear force, before being abandoned in favor of quantum chromodynamics.
By the late 1970s, these two frameworks had proven to be sufficient to explain most of the observed features of the universe, from elementary particles to atoms to the evolution of stars and the universe as a whole. In spite of these successes, there are still many problems that remain to be solved.
His announcement led to a flurry of research activity now known as the second superstring revolution. ===Unification of superstring theories=== In the 1970s, many physicists became interested in supergravity theories, which combine general relativity with supersymmetry.
In the 1970s, the physicist Jacob Bekenstein suggested that the entropy of a black hole is instead proportional to the surface area of its event horizon, the boundary beyond which matter and radiation are lost to its gravitational attraction.
Another reason is that it provides a general framework in which physicists can study and attempt to resolve the paradoxes of black holes. In 1975, Stephen Hawking published a calculation which suggested that black holes are not completely black but emit a dim radiation due to quantum effects near the event horizon.
In 1978, work by Werner Nahm showed that the maximum spacetime dimension in which one can formulate a consistent supersymmetric theory is eleven.
Another feature of string theory that many physicists were drawn to in the 1980s and 1990s was its high degree of uniqueness.
Edward Witten and others observed this chirality property cannot be readily derived by compactifying from eleven dimensions. In the first superstring revolution in 1984, many physicists turned to string theory as a unified theory of particle physics and quantum gravity.
In 1987, Eric Bergshoeff, Ergin Sezgin, and Paul Townsend showed that eleven-dimensional supergravity includes two-dimensional branes.
Another feature of string theory that many physicists were drawn to in the 1980s and 1990s was its high degree of uniqueness.
In string theory, the possibilities are much more constrained: by the 1990s, physicists had argued that there were only five consistent supersymmetric versions of the theory. Although there were only a handful of consistent superstring theories, it remained a mystery why there was not just one consistent formulation.
The Bekenstein–Hawking entropy formula gives the expected value of the entropy of a black hole, but by the 1990s, physicists still lacked a derivation of this formula by counting microstates in a theory of quantum gravity.
The connection between the physical notion of a brane and the mathematical notion of a category has led to important mathematical insights in the fields of algebraic and symplectic geometry and representation theory. ==M-theory== Prior to 1995, theorists believed that there were five consistent versions of superstring theory (type I, type IIA, type IIB, and two versions of heterotic string theory).
This understanding changed in 1995 when Edward Witten suggested that the five theories were just special limiting cases of an eleven-dimensional theory called M-theory.
Duff and his collaborators showed that this construction reproduces exactly the strings appearing in type IIA superstring theory. Speaking at a string theory conference in 1995, Edward Witten made the surprising suggestion that all five superstring theories were in fact just different limiting cases of a single theory in eleven spacetime dimensions.
Finding such a derivation of this formula was considered an important test of the viability of any theory of quantum gravity such as string theory. ===Derivation within string theory=== In a paper from 1996, Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa showed how to derive the Beckenstein–Hawking formula for certain black holes in string theory.
In late 1997, theorists discovered an important relationship called the AdS/CFT correspondence, which relates string theory to another type of physical theory called a quantum field theory. One of the challenges of string theory is that the full theory does not have a satisfactory definition in all circumstances.
In late 1997 this line of work culminated in the discovery of the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence or AdS/CFT.
A matrix model describes the behavior of a set of matrices within the framework of quantum mechanics. One important example of a matrix model is the BFSS matrix model proposed by Tom Banks, Willy Fischler, Stephen Shenker, and Leonard Susskind in 1997.
The AdS/CFT correspondence was first proposed by Juan Maldacena in late 1997.
In a paper from 1998, Alain Connes, Michael R.
Indeed, in 1998, Strominger argued that the original result could be generalized to an arbitrary consistent theory of quantum gravity without relying on strings or supersymmetry.
In 2005, Hawking announced that the paradox had been settled in favor of information conservation by the AdS/CFT correspondence, and he suggested a concrete mechanism by which black holes might preserve information. ===Applications to nuclear physics=== In addition to its applications to theoretical problems in quantum gravity, the AdS/CFT correspondence has been applied to a variety of problems in quantum field theory.
In an article appearing in 2005, Đàm Thanh Sơn and his collaborators showed that the AdS/CFT correspondence could be used to understand some aspects of the quark-gluon plasma by describing it in the language of string theory.
In 2008, the predicted value of this ratio for the quark-gluon plasma was confirmed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. ===Applications to condensed matter physics=== The AdS/CFT correspondence has also been used to study aspects of condensed matter physics.
In collaboration with several other authors in 2010, he showed that some results on black hole entropy could be extended to non-extremal astrophysical black holes. ==AdS/CFT correspondence== One approach to formulating string theory and studying its properties is provided by the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence.
By 2010, Maldacena's article had over 7000 citations, becoming the most highly cited article in the field of [energy physics]. ===Overview of the correspondence=== In the AdS/CFT correspondence, the geometry of spacetime is described in terms of a certain vacuum solution of Einstein's equation called anti-de Sitter space.
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