Confining Strings and Gauge Fields in AdS

I will discuss flux tubes, or strings, in confining gauge theories focusing on large-N pure Yang-Mills theory. After reviewing briefly the recent progress in understanding the long strings in flat space both form effective field theory and form the lattice, I will discuss the new analytic approach that uses AdS space as an IR regulator. For AdS radius large, compared to the confinement scale, we recover the usual confining string. For small radius gauge theory is perturbative and we find a weakly coupled string-like object held together by the AdS gravitational potential. Power of conformal symmetry allows us to establish a smooth interpolation between the two regimes. Time permitting, I will also mention a connection with AdS/CFT integrability.