Igor Klebanov
Igor Romanovich Klebanov (born March 29, 1962) is an American theoretical physicist whose research is centered on relations between string theory and quantum gauge field theory. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at Princeton University where he is currently a Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Biography. Klebanov grew up in Kharkiv and emigrated to the U.S. with his parents and sister when he was 16. He received his undergraduate education at MIT (class of 1982 ) and his Ph.D. degree at Princeton University in 1986 as a student of Curtis Callan. In his thesis he made advances in the Skyrme model of hadrons. Klebanov worked as a post-doc in the SLAC Theory Group. His main contributions to string theory are in Matrix model approaches to two-dimensional strings, in brane dynamics, and in the gauge theory-gravity duality. His work in 1996-97 on relations between branes in supergravity and their gauge theory description anticipated the gauge theory-gravity correspondence. Klebanov's 1998 paper "Gauge Theory Correlators from Non-Critical String Theory" with his graduate  student Gubser, and Polyakov, which made a precise statement of the AdS/CFT duality, is among the all-time top cited papers in high-energy physics (it has over 11,000 citations according to Google Scholar). A series of papers by Klebanov and collaborators on D-branes on the conifold has led to discovery of cascading gauge theory. Its dual warped throat provides a geometric description of color confinement and chiral symmetry breaking; it has been used in model building for cosmology and particle physics. The relation between 3-dimensional critical O(N) model and bosonic higher-spin gauge theory in 4 -dimensional AdS space has been called the Klebanov-Polyakov correspondence. Klebanov's more recent work includes the Entanglement Entropy in confining gauge theories, the F-theorem for Renormalization Group flows, large N tensor models, and field theory descriptions of certain critical phenomena.