Igor Klebanov

Princeton University (PhD) String theory Igor R. Klebanov (born 1962) is an American theoretical physicist. 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. Since 2022, he is the director of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.

Klebanov received his undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 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, which included the first paper on a Skyrmion crystal. 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 with his graduate student Steven Gubser, and Alexander M. Polyakov, which made a precise statement of the AdS/CFT duality, is among the top cited papers in theoretical high-energy physics. 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, field theory descriptions of critical phenomena, and quantum many-body scars as group invariant states.