Gravitational aspects of String Theory and Holography 

Starting from the 1970s String Theory emerged as a natural framework for perturbative quantum gravity that extends Einstein's classical theory. Since then it has served as an inspirational source for several major developments in the study of gravity, including the first explicit "holographic" correspondences put forward by Maldacena in 1997. This idea states that certain strongly interacting non-gravitational theories in lower dimension capture fully the physics of gravitational theories in higher dimension. This unexpected correspondence is been actively used in several directions, from the study of the microscopic structure of black holes to the analysis of strongly coupled quantum system such as those that capture the behaviour of matter in extreme situations. 

The study of holography in the two-dimensional anti-de Sitter setting has led to a playful interplay between random matrix theory, quantum chaos and quantum gravity. Insights in this domain have driven new questions about to the nature of gravity and have sharpened past puzzles related to Hawking’s information paradox. The lessons for de Sitter remain to be found, and there is good reason to believe that the physics of cosmology will be of a different flavour, yet nevertheless related to random matrix theory in a crucial way. 

Comparison of the energy as a function of temperature between the supergravity prediction and the lattice simulations of the dual quantum field theory