QCD and String Theory

Abstract

This talk begins with some history and basic facts about string theory and its connections with strong interactions. Comparisons of stacks of Dirichlet branes with curved backgrounds produced by them are used to motivate the AdS/CFT correspondence between superconformal gauge theory and string theory on a product of Anti-de Sitter space and a compact manifold. The ensuing duality between semi-classical spinning strings and long gauge theory operators is briefly reviewed. Strongly coupled thermal SYM theory is explored via a black hole in 5-dimensional AdS space, which leads to explicit results for its entropy and shear viscosity. A conjectured universal lower bound on the viscosity to entropy density ratio, and its possible relation to recent results from RHIC, are discussed. Finally, some available results on string duals of confining gauge theories are briefly reviewed.

12 pages, prepared for the Proceedings of the 2005 Lepton-Photon Symposium; v2: minor revisions, references added, the version to appear in the proceedings

References in corpus (13)

• Experimental and Theoretical Challenges in the Search for the Quark Gluon Plasma: The STAR Collaboration's Critical Assessment of the Evidence from RHIC Collisions
• Formation of dense partonic matter in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC: Experimental evaluation by the PHENIX collaboration
• Quark Gluon Plasma an Color Glass Condensate at RHIC? The perspective from the BRAHMS experiment
• The PHOBOS Perspective on Discoveries at RHIC
• QCD and a Holographic Model of Hadrons
• Iteration of Planar Amplitudes in Maximally Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory at Three Loops and Beyond
• Chiral symmetry breaking from five dimensional spaces
• Hadronic Spectrum of a Holographic Dual of QCD
• The Dilatation Operator of N=4 Super Yang-Mills Theory and Integrability
• Coupling constant dependence of the shear viscosity in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory
• Integrability in QCD and beyond
• Semiclassical strings and AdS/CFT
• Lattice QCD equation of state : improving the differential method

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• Magnetic component of Yang-Mills plasma
• Testing AdS/CFT Deviations from pQCD Heavy Quark Energy Loss with Pb+Pb at LHC
• Duality between QCD Perturbative Series and Power Corrections
• Hadron Spectroscopy and Structure from AdS/CFT
• Four-point functions and kaon decays in a minimal AdS/QCD model
• Qualitative solution of QCD sum rules
• On two-point correlation functions in AdS/QCD
• On coincidence of Alday-Maldacena-regularized $\sigma$-model and Nambu-Goto areas of minimal surfaces
• Matter of resolution: from quasiclassics to fine tuning
• Probing the Frontiers of QCD
• Quark Matter 2005: Experimental Conference Summary
• Strings for Quantumchromodynamics
• The Dynamics and Thermodynamics of Soft-Wall AdS/QCD
• Hydrodynamics of strongly coupled non-conformal fluids from gauge/gravity duality