Editing AdS/CFT correspondence (section)

=== Maldacena's paper ===
[[Image:JuanMaldacena.jpg|thumb|upright=0.6|[[Juan Maldacena]] first proposed the AdS/CFT correspondence in late 1997.]]

On January 1, 1998, [[Juan Maldacena]] published a landmark paper that initiated the study of AdS/CFT.{{sfn|ps=|Maldacena|1998|loc=The pre-print was submitted in 1997 and published on January 1, 1998.}} According to [[Alexander Markovich Polyakov]], "[Maldacena's] work opened the flood gates."{{sfn|ps=|Polyakov|2008|p=6}} The conjecture immediately excited great interest in the string theory community{{sfn|ps=|Maldacena|2005|p=63}} and was considered in a paper by [[Steven Gubser]], [[Igor Klebanov]] and Polyakov,{{sfn|ps=|Gubser|Klebanov|Polyakov|1998}} and another paper of [[Edward Witten]].{{sfn|ps=|Witten|1998}} These papers made Maldacena's conjecture more precise and showed that the conformal field theory appearing in the correspondence lives on the boundary of anti-de&nbsp;Sitter space.{{sfn|ps=|Polyakov|2008|p=6}}

One special case of Maldacena's proposal says that {{nowrap|1=''N'' = 4}} super Yang–Mills theory, a [[gauge theory]] similar in some ways to quantum chromodynamics, is equivalent to string theory in five-dimensional anti-de&nbsp;Sitter space.{{sfn|ps=|Aharony|Bergman|Jafferis|Maldacena|2008}} This result helped clarify the earlier work of 't Hooft on the relationship between string theory and quantum chromodynamics, taking string theory back to its roots as a theory of nuclear physics.{{sfn|ps=|Aharony|Bergman|Jafferis|Maldacena|2008|loc=sec. 1.1}} Maldacena's results also provided a concrete realization of the holographic principle with important implications for quantum gravity and black hole physics.{{sfn|ps=|de Haro|Dieks|'t Hooft|Verlinde|2013|p=2}} By the year 2015, Maldacena's paper had become the most highly cited paper in [[high energy physics]] with over 10,000 citations.{{refn|name="inspire"}} These subsequent articles have provided considerable evidence that the correspondence is correct, although so far it has not been [[Mathematical proof|rigorously proved]].{{sfn|ps=|Maldacena|2005|p=63}}{{sfn|ps=|Cowen|2013}}