Abstract

Quantum gravity and quark confinement are two long-standing puzzles in theoretical physics. With the help of the AdS/CFT correspondence and the recent development of Jackiw-Teitelboim quantum gravity in two dimensions, we will see that these two puzzles are linked together in a fascinating way. Specifically, a large class of black holes has a near-horizon AdS_2 geometry. With the Jackiw-Teitelboim theory of quantum gravity, we can study quantum gravity effects in the near-horizon AdS_2 region and then lift them to higher-dimensional black holes. It turns out that these tiny quantum gravitational effects can play a key role in low-temperature AdS/CFT. We will discuss how this new approach can solve various problems. One important application is that quantum gravity fluctuations in the near-horizon region will lead to quark confinement in (super-)Yang-Mills gauge theories on the boundary. This talk is based on the recent paper 2412.11107 with my collaborators.

Bio

Jun Nian is an assistant professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics Asia Pacific (ICTP-AP), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received a Diploma degree from the University of Heidelberg in 2009 and a Ph.D. degree from Stony Brook University in 2015. Before joining ICTP-AP in 2021, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) and the University of Michigan. His research interests include quantum field theory, gravity theory, and string theory, with a recent focus on the quantum effects of black holes.