Our current understanding of fundamental interactions is quite limited if the interactions are strong. An unexpected insight into the physics of strongly-coupled systems has emerged from string theory, which links it to gravitational dynamics in curved space-time. These developments, known as “holographic duality”, gave a new perspective on a number of old questions ranging from the quark confinement problem in strong interactions, hydrodynamics of strongly-coupled plasmas and existence of extra dimensions. The talk is intended for a general physics audience, no special knowledge is required.

Konstantin Zarembo received his PhD from the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow in 1997. After postdoctoral position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2001 he moved to the Uppsala University as an Assistant Professor. In 2008-2010 he has been a Directeur de Recherche de 2ème classe of CNRS at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He became a Professor of Nordita in 2010.

Konstantin's field of research is theoretical high-energy physics, with main interests in quantum field theory, string theory and integrable systems. During the last few years he has been working on non-perturbative aspects of the relationship between gauge fields and strings, and on exact results in this area that can be obtained with the help of the theory of integrable systems. He pioneered the use of the Yang-Baxter equations for gauge fields, which has led to new non-perturbative results in quantum field theory. He also worked on various aspects of string theory, on statistical applications of field theory, on color superconductivity and on matrix models.