Lecture 1: Monday, 14 October 2019 at 11:30 am
Lecture 2: Tuesday, 15 October 2019 at 11:30 am
Lecture 3: Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at 11:30 am
In these lectures, I will discuss baryonic operators and determinant operators in large N gauge theories. These are interesting observables that are known to be dual to D-branes, but are nevertheless much less studied as compared to single-trace operators. After reviewing basics of large N expansions and the difficulty associated with baryonic and determinant operators, I will introduce a new perturbative approach to compute correlation functions of determinant operators. In particular, I will discuss the emergent semi-classical description, the relation to holes on the string worldsheet, and the connection to "open-closed-open triality" proposed by Gopakumar. The discussion will be mostly focused on N=4 SYM, but I also plan to give some review of almost-unknown works by Kazakov, Kostov and Migdal in the early 80's. I will then proceed to explain a nonperturbative method to compute correlation functions of determinant operators in N=4 SYM using integrability of dual string worldsheet.