Gauge Theories as String Theories: the First Results

The brief review of the duality between gauge theories and closed strings propagating in the curved space is based on the lectures given at ITEP Winter School - 2005Comment: Latex, 35 pages, Lectures given at ITEP Winter School, March 200

RG-Whitham dynamics and complex Hamiltonian systems

Inspired by the Seiberg-Witten exact solution, we consider some aspects of the Hamiltonian dynamics with the complexified phase space focusing at the renormalization group(RG)-like Whitham behavior. We show that at the Argyres-Douglas(AD) point the number of degrees of freedom in Hamiltonian system effectively reduces and argue that anomalous dimensions at AD point coincide with the Berry indexes in classical mechanics. In the framework of Whitham dynamics AD point turns out to be a fixed point. We demonstrate that recently discovered Dunne-\"Unsal relation in quantum mechanics relevant for the exact quantization condition exactly coincides with the Whitham equation of motion in the Omega - deformed theory.Comment: v3: 34 pages, several typos corrected, a reference added, to appear in Nuclear Physics

Condensates and instanton - torus knot duality. Hidden Physics at UV scale

We establish the duality between the torus knot superpolynomials or the Poincar\'e polynomials of the Khovanov homology and particular condensates in $\Omega$-deformed 5D supersymmetric QED compactified on a circle with 5d Chern-Simons(CS) term. It is explicitly shown that $n$-instanton contribution to the condensate of the massless flavor in the background of four-observable, exactly coincides with the superpolynomial of the $T(n,nk+1)$ torus knot where $k$ - is the level of CS term. In contrast to the previously known results, the particular torus knot corresponds not to the partition function of the gauge theory but to the particular instanton contribution and summation over the knots has to be performed in order to obtain the complete answer. The instantons are sitting almost at the top of each other and the physics of the "fat point" where the UV degrees of freedom are slaved with point-like instantons turns out to be quite rich. Also also see knot polynomials in the quantum mechanics on the instanton moduli space. We consider the different limits of this correspondence focusing at their physical interpretation and compare the algebraic structures at the both sides of the correspondence. Using the AGT correspondence, we establish a connection between superpolynomials for unknots and q-deformed DOZZ factors.Comment: v2: text substantially improve