AdS/CFT duality user guide (Q726683)

The book describes applications of the AdS/CFT duality for beginning graduate students in particle physics and for researchers in the other fields. In fact the book covers almost a greatest part of modern theoretical physics, but presented in style accessible for theoretical beginning students. The book would be of interest for a large circle of readers. The book is structured in 14 chapters (including an introduction), almost each of which contains appendixes with details of calculations. References has been given at the finish of every chapter. As the author writes in the introduction ``The original AdS/CFT paper by \textit{J. Maldacena} [Adv. Theor. Math. Phys. 2, No. 2, 231--252 (1998; Zbl 0914.53047)] has been cited in all physics arXivs. This is because the duality is becoming a powerful tool to analyze the ``real world''. For example, it turns out that one prediction of AdS/CFT is indeed close to the experimental results of the real quark-gluon plasma. Since then, the duality has been applied to various fields of Physics; examples are QCD, nuclear physics, non-equilibrium physics, and condensed matter physics.'' The book has been written with great pedagogical talent, and care, is easy for reading and invites the reader to follow the author through the labyrinths of physics. The most impressive in the book is the width of subject areas covered by the author. This make the book useful for physicists working in any area. In spite of author is citing by preference only other textbooks and review articles, I would like to recommend him to add a citation at least of works which has received Nobel Prizes, for example the articles of D. Gross, D. Politzer and F. Wilczek concerning quarks confinement, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2004 was awarded jointly to David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek ``for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction''. Another paper of interest to be added in the references list of the book is the original paper [\textit{W. de Sitter}, Amst. Ak. Versl. 26, 1472--1475 (1918; JFM 46.1342.02)] in which the de Sitter geometry was found.