Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/AdS/CFT correspondence

AdS/CFT correspondence
This nomination predates the introduction in April 2014 of article-specific subpages for nominations and has been created from the edit history of Today's featured article/requests. 
 * This is the archived discussion of the TFAR nomination for the article below. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/requests). Please do not modify this page. 

The result was: scheduled for Today's featured article/December 8, 2013 by BencherliteTalk 22:33, 21 November 2013‎ (UTC)



The anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence is a conjectured relationship in theoretical physics between two kinds of physical theories. On one side of the correspondence are conformal field theories, including theories similar to the Yang–Mills theories that describe elementary particles. On the other side of the correspondence are are anti-de Sitter spaces (cross section depicted), which are used in theories of quantum gravity, formulated in terms of string theory or M-theory. Proposed by Juan Maldacena in late 1997, the AdS/CFT correspondence represents a major advance in our understanding of string theory and quantum gravity. This is because it provides a non-perturbative formulation of string theory and because it is the most successful realization of the holographic principle, an idea in quantum gravity originally proposed by Gerard 't Hooft. In addition, it provides a powerful toolkit for studying strongly coupled quantum field theories and has been used to study many features of nuclear and condensed matter physics by translating problems in those subjects into more mathematically tractable problems in string theory.

For the past fifteen years, the AdS/CFT correspondence has been one of the dominant ideas in high energy theoretical physics. Although it's a ferociously technical topic, this article manages to make it accessible to a broad audience. There aren't a lot of theoretical physics articles that make it to FA status, and I think it would be cool to feature this one on the main page. Polytope24 (talk) 20:11, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Support, high quality article, promoted to FA in 2013. Also, SCIENCE!!! &mdash; Cirt (talk) 20:17, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I should add that I am the main contributor and have not previously had an article appear as TFA (1 point). I don't believe there have been any physics articles on the main page for three months (1 point), but I'm not totally sure about this. Polytope24 (talk) 20:21, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment The picture is pretty, but the blurb doesn't mention it, and it's not clear to the reader how it is relevant. I'm not quite sure how to bring it in simply, however. I'd also suggest keeping the sentence "On the other side of the correspondence are theories of quantum gravity..." as "On the other side of the correspondence are anti-de Sitter spaces (AdS),  used in theories of quantum gravity...", as in the article lead. AdS is used in quantum gravity theories, but is not itself a theory of quantum gravity. MChesterMC (talk) 10:50, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Okay, let me know what you think of the revised blurb. Also, notice that if you hold your cursor over the image, you'll see a caption that explains how it's related to the article. Polytope24 (talk) 17:02, 21 November 2013 (UTC)


 * The article has to be linked as well as in bold; for technical reasons, the TFA blurb bold link must have the proper article name, not a redirect; the article should be the first link in the blurb (as it always is) lest readers mistake what the TFA is and click on something else instead; and a hoverlink explanation of the image is not enough. BencherliteTalk 22:02, 21 November 2013 (UTC)