The gauge-string duality and heavy ion collisions

Abstract

I review at a non-technical level the use of the gauge-string duality to study aspects of heavy ion collisions, with special emphasis on the trailing string calculation of heavy quark energy loss. I include some brief speculations on how variants of the trailing string construction could provide a toy model of black hole formation and evaporation. This essay is an invited contribution to "Forty Years of String Theory" and is aimed at philosophers and historians of science as well as physicists.

21 pages

References in corpus (18)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• Energy loss of a heavy quark moving through N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma
• Drag force in AdS/CFT
• Calculating the Jet Quenching Parameter from AdS/CFT
• Heavy Quark Diffusion in Strongly Coupled $\mathbb{N}=4$ Yang Mills
• A calculation of the bulk viscosity in SU(3) gluodynamics
• Holography and colliding gravitational shock waves in asymptotically AdS_5 spacetime
• Thermal Dileptons at LHC
• Heavy-Quark Kinetics in the QGP at LHC
• Superconductors from Superstrings
• Symmetry constraints on generalizations of Bjorken flow
• Momentum fluctuations of heavy quarks in the gauge-string duality
• Conformal hydrodynamics in Minkowski and de Sitter spacetimes
• Comparing the drag force on heavy quarks in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory and QCD
• Heavy Quark Diffusion with Relativistic Langevin Dynamics in the Quark-Gluon Fluid
• Properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma: A lattice perspective
• Conformal symmetry and the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation
• The Color Glass Condensate and Glasma

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Dependence of asymmetries for charge distribution with respect to the reaction plane on initial energy in heavy ion collisions
• The Dynamics and Thermodynamics of Soft-Wall AdS/QCD
• Aspects of quarkonium propagation in a thermal medium as seen by string models