Glueballs and AdS/CFT

Abstract

I review the calculation of the glueball spectrum in non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory (in 3 and 4 dimensions) using the conjectured duality between supergravity and large N gauge theories. The glueball masses are obtained by solving the supergravity wave equations in a black hole geometry. The masses obtained this way are in unexpectedly good agreement with the available lattice data, and are much better than strong-coupling expansion results. I also show how to use a modified version of the duality to calculate the glueball mass spectrum with some of the Kaluza-Klein states of the supergravity theory decoupled from the spectrum.

10 pages, 1 figure. Invited talk, "The Phenomenology of Large-Nc QCD", to be published in Proceedings of the Institute of Nuclear Theory