Non-lattice simulation of supersymmetric gauge theories as a probe to quantum black holes and strings

In the past decade we have witnessed remarkable developments in the gauge-gravity duality, which suggested a new approach to superstring theory and quantum space-time. In this context it is important to study supersymmetric large-N gauge theories in the strongly coupled regime. I will summarize the results and insights obtained so far by non-lattice simulations. A simple example of the gauge-gravity duality is the one between 1d U(N) gauge theory with 16 supercharges and the so-called black 0-brane solution in type IIA supergravity. In order for this duality to be valid, one has to take the 't Hooft large-N limit and to take the strong coupling limit on the gauge theory side. The gauge theory can be regularized by fixing the gauge completely thanks to one dimension, and by introducing a Fourier mode cutoff. One can then use the standard RHMC algorithm to simulate the system. The energy calculated as a function of the temperature was compared with the results obtained from the gravity side based on the black hole thermodynamics. This confirmed the gauge-gravity duality with high accuracy and provided the microscopic origin of the black hole thermodynamics. From the calculation of the Wilson loop, one obtains the Schwarzschild radius of the dual geometry. One can actually use the present 1d model with supersymmetric mass deformation to study \mathcal{N}=4 super Yang-Mills theory on R \times S^3 based on a novel large-N reduction, which generalizes the original idea of Eguchi and Kawai. It is remarkable that we can now simulate the 4d superconformal field theory, which appears in the most typical case of the gauge-gravity duality known as the AdS/CFT correspondence. In particular, no fine-tuning is required unlike previous proposals based on the lattice regularization.