Holographic effective field theories and the AdS_4/CFT_3 correspondence

The identifcation of the low-energy effective field theory associated with a given microscopic strongly interacting theory constitutes a fundamental problem in theoretical physics, which is particularly hard when the theory is not sufficiently constrained by symmetries. Recently, a new approach has been proposed, which addresses this problem for a large class of four-dimensional superconformal field theories, admitting a dual weakly coupled holographic description in string theory. This approach provides a precise prescription for the holographic derivation of the associated effective field theories. The aim of the thesis is to explore the generalization of this approach to the three-dimensional superconformal field theories admitting a dual M-theory description, by focusing on a specific model whose effective feld theory has not been investigated so far.