String Theory and M-Theory

Bibliographic discussion 699
dacena (1998). There had been earlier hints of such a connection in Maldacena
and Strominger (1997a, 1997b) and Douglas, Polchinski and Strominger
(1997). Some aspects of AdS/CFT also appear in Klebanov (1997), Gubser,
Klebanov and Tseytlin (1997) and Gubser and Klebanov (1997). Important
details were elucidated in Gubser, Klebanov and Polyakov (1998) and
Witten (1998b). A detailed review of the AdS/CFT correspondence and
related topics was given in Aharony, Gubser, Maldacena, Ooguri and Oz
(2000). Some recent developments, not discussed in the text, include Kazakov,
Marshakov, Minahan and Zarembo (2004), Lin, Lunin and Maldacena
(2004), Beisert and Staudacher (2005) and Hofman and Maldacena (2006).
The field theory dual of type IIB superstring theory on AdS5 × T 1,1 , that
is, the conifold, was identified in Klebanov and Witten (1998). The duality
cascade associated with the addition of fractional branes was explained in
Klebanov and Strassler (2000) building on the earlier works Polchinski and
Strassler (2000), Klebanov and Nekrasov (2000) and Klebanov and Tseytlin
(2000).
Blau, Figueroa-O’Farrill, Hull and Papadopoulos (2002a) discovered that
type IIB superstring theory admits a maximally supersymmetric plane-wave
solution. Metsaev (2002) showed the world-sheet action for this background
becomes a free theory in the light-cone GS formalism. The plane-wave
limit of the AdS/CFT duality was introduced in Berenstein, Maldacena and
Nastase (2002).
Geometric transitions were first discussed in Gopakumar and Vafa (1999).
They have been used in the study of large-N limits in Vafa (2001) and
Maldacena and Nuñez (2001b) among others.