Abstract
Relativistic heavy ion collisions create a strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma. Some of the plasma’s properties can be approximately understood in terms of a dual black hole. These properties include shear viscosity, thermalization time, and drag force on heavy quarks. They are hard to calculate from first principles in QCD. Extracting predictions about quark-gluon plasmas from dual black holes mostly involves solving Einstein’s equations and classical string equations of motion. AdS/CFT provides a translation from gravitational calculations to gauge theory predictions. The gauge theory to which the predictions apply is \(\mathcal {N}\) = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory. QCD is different in many respects from super-Yang-Mills, but it seems that its high temperature properties are similar enough to make some meaningful comparisons.
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Third Award in the 2007 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation.
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Gubser, S.S. Heavy ion collisions and black hole dynamics. Gen Relativ Gravit 39, 1533–1538 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-007-0473-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-007-0473-8