Igor Klebanov

Klebanov's 1998 paper Gauge Theory Correlators from Non-Critical String Theory with his graduate student Gubser, and Polyakov, which made a precise statement of the AdS/CFT duality, is among the all-time top cited papers in high-energy physics (it has over 8700 citations according to Google Scholar). 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.

Igor Romanovich Klebanov (Russian: И́горь Ромáнович Клеба́нов ; 29 March 1962) is a theoretical physicist whose research is centered on relations between string theory and quantum gauge field theory. 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.

Born in the Soviet Union in 1962, he emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager. He received his undergraduate education at MIT (class of 1982), and his Ph.D. degree at Princeton University as a student of Curtis Callan in 1986. In his thesis he made advances in the Skyrme model of hadrons. Klebanov worked as a post-doc at SLAC. His main contributions to string theory are in Matrix model approaches to two-dimensional strings, in brane dynamics, and more recently 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.