The end of term project for 8.821 will be a half-hour presentation or short (say 5 pages) paper summarizing a topic of interest, relevant to our class. The topic needn't be about string theory or gauge/gravity duality specifically.

An appropriate topic could also be a system that you think may be amenable to study with a gravity dual and want to learn more about.

Your goal in deciding what to say should be to try to save the rest of us from having to read the papers. Give some context, say what the crucial point is, say what the implications are.

If you are planning to give a talk, I can't recommend highly enough the advice from Geroch, gr-qc/9703019.

Below are some topic suggestions, involving wildly varying levels of difficulty. The list is certainly not in any sense exhaustive. Creative topics are encouraged.

Some Topic Suggestions

1. Holographic RG flows and an 'a-theorem'
   
   
2. String duals of gauge theories with matter in the fundamental and thermal aspects
   
   
3. More systematic understanding of thereal-time AdS/CFT prescription
   
   
4. Gravity duals of supersymmetric confining gauge theories with chiral symmetry breaking
   
   
5. AdS/QCD
   
   
6. Entanglement entropy from the gravity dual
   
   
7. 2d strong-coupling transport in a magnetic field; constraints from EM duality in the bulk
   
   
8. Holographic models of superfluidity and superconductivity
   
   
9. Expanding strongly-coupled plasma
   
   
10. Charged particles in strongly-coupled plasma: jet, and/or string dragging
    
    
11. Attempts to see a fermi surface in the gravity dual
    
    
12. Finite-N effects: the stringy exclusion principle and giant gravitons
    
    
13. A solvable limit of AdS/CFT
    
    
14. Spin chains and the dilatation operator
    
    
15. Cusp anomalous dimension from string theory
    
    
16. BPS Wilson loops
    
    
17. C ≤ 1 strings and matrix models, an example of holography
    
    
18. AdS₃and 2d CFT
    
    
19. Holography for large-N vector models?
    
    
20. Behind the horizon by analyticity
    
    
21. Matrix models of black hole information con-sumption
    
    
22. String theory and the physics of hadrons
    
    
23. Microscopic accounting of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy for BPS black holes
    
    
24. Birkhoff/no-hair, quasinormal modes, and thermalization
    
    
25. Computation of hydrodynamic green functions

Annotated list of topics (PDF)