Significant and ongoing progress has been made in the past couple of years in finding “holographic” avatars of central concepts from condensed matter physics. Originally developed within string theory, the holographic correspondence provides a geometrical framework for certain strongly coupled field theories, easily incorporating theories at nonzero temperature and density. The holographic approach offers qualitatively new perspectives on certain systems without long-lived quasiparticles and for which a perturbative treatment is ineffective.

The ongoing development of the “ads/cmt” field depends upon continued interaction between condensed matter and high-energy theorists, and one purpose of this program is to bring the communities together for a prolonged period. While an increasing range of holographic tools are being assembled, a dialogue between communities will be necessary to identify experimental and theoretical systems where these tools can be fruitfully applied. There are several outstanding problems in condensed matter physics that appear to involve strong coupling physics, most infamously the strange metal region of the cuprates. Another example of a system of interest is a cold fermi gas tuned to saturate unitarity scattering limits.