Instructor: Simone Giombi, Perimeter Institute
Type: Perimeter Institute non-credit mini-course
Dates: March 24, 25, 28 and 29, 2011; 9:30 am, Bob Room

This will be an introduction to higher spin gauge theories, and especially their role in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. After reviewing some relevant background, I will describe Vasiliev's theory of interacting higher spin gauge fields in AdS_4. As conjectured by Klebanov-Polyakov and Sezgin-Sundell, this theory is expected to be holographically dual to vector models in 3 dimensions. I will overview some recent progress in testing this duality.