Holography and the Quark-Gluon Plasma

by Francesco Bigazzi

Monday 25 Feb 2013, 14:30 → 16:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dip. di Fisica - Edificio G. Marconi)

In highly energetic collisions of heavy ions, a novel state of matter, called quark-gluon plasma, is produced. Data collected at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and at LHC, suggest that the plasma behaves like a nearly ideal liquid and thus that it is inherently strongly coupled. Understanding its dynamical properties is very challenging for theoretical physics. Holographic techniques, mapping strongly coupled quantum field theories to weakly coupled higher dimensional theories of gravity, could help in providing novel complementary tools. After providing a short general introduction to these techniques I will focus on some applications to Quark-Gluon plasma models, focusing on flavor effects, thermodynamics and transport properties.