Karl-Henning Rehren is a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 who focuses on algebraic quantum field theory.

Rehren studied physics in Heidelberg

Heidelberg

-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...

, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 and Freiburg

Freiburg

Freiburg im Breisgau is a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. In the extreme south-west of the country, it straddles the Dreisam river, at the foot of the Schlossberg. Historically, the city has acted as the hub of the Breisgau region on the western edge of the Black Forest in the Upper Rhine Plain...

. In Freiburg he received his PhD

PHD

PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 (advisor Klaus Pohlmeyer) in 1984. Habilitation 1991 in Berlin. Since 1997 he teaches physics in Göttingen

Göttingen

Göttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...

.

In 1999 he discovered the Algebraic holography

Algebraic holography

Algebraic holography, also sometimes called Rehren duality, is an attempt to understand the holographic principle of quantum gravity within the framework of algebraic quantum field theory, due to Karl-Henning Rehren. It is sometimes described as an alternative formulation of the AdS/CFT...

 (also Rehren duality), a duality in the sense of the Holographic principle

Holographic principle

The holographic principle is a property of quantum gravity and string theories which states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region—preferably a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon...

, which maps N=4 superconformal SU(N) Yang-Mills theory to an ordinary quantum field theory on AdS₅. This is at least in superficial contradiction to the more well known Maldacena duality, the AdS/CFT correspondence

AdS/CFT correspondence

In physics, the AdS/CFT correspondence , sometimes called the Maldacena duality, is the conjectured equivalence between a string theory and gravity defined on one space, and a quantum field theory without gravity defined on the conformal boundary of this space, whose dimension is lower by one or more...

.

In 2006 he co-authored the controversial review article Quantum Field Theory: Where We Are to be published in the book An Assessment of Current Paradigms in the Physics of Fundamental Phenomena.

External links

• Homepage at University Göttingen
• SPIRES directory of papers Quantum Field Theory: Where We Are by Klaus Fredenhagen, Karl-Henning Rehren, Erhard Seiler