Charged black holes and the AdS/CFT correspondence

The AdS/CFT duality is an equivalence between string theory and gauge theory. The duality allows one to use calculations done in classical gravity to derive results in strongly-coupled field theories. This thesis explores several applications of the duality that have some relevance to condensed matter physics. In the first of these applications, it is shown that a large class of strongly-coupled (3 + 1)-dimensional conformal field theories undergo a superfluid phase transition in which a certain chiral primary operator develops a non-zero expectation value at low temperatures. A suggestion is made for the identity of the condensing operator in the field theory. In a different application, the conifold theory, an SU(N) x SU(N) gauge theory, is studied at nonzero chemical potential for baryon number density. In the low-temperature limit, the near-horizon geometry of the dual supergravity solution becomes a warped product AdS 2 x R3 x T1,1, with logarithmic warp factors. This encodes a type of emergent quantum near-criticality in the field theory. A similar construction is analyzed in the context of M theory. This construction is based on branes wrapped around topologically nontrivial cycles of the geometry. Several non-supersymmetric solutions are found, which pass a number of stability checks. Reducing one of the solutions to type IIA string theory, and T-dualizing to type IIB yields a product of a squashed Sasaki-Einstein manifold with an extremal BTZ black hole. Possible field theory interpretations are discussed.