Gauge/String Duality, Hot QCD and Heavy Ion Collisions 1st Edition by Jorge Casalderrey-Solana (PDF)

Description

Heavy ion collision experiments recreating the quark-gluon plasma that filled the microseconds-old universe have established that it is a nearly perfect liquid that flows with such minimal dissipation that it cannot be seen as made of particles. String theory provides a powerful toolbox for studying matter with such properties. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to gauge/string duality and its applications to the study of the thermal and transport properties of quark-gluon plasma, the dynamics of how it forms, the hydrodynamics of how it flows, and its response to probes including jets and quarkonium mesons. Calculations are discussed in the context of data from RHIC and LHC and results from finite temperature lattice QCD. The book is an ideal reference for students and researchers in string theory, quantum field theory, quantum many-body physics, heavy ion physics and lattice QCD.

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⭐In an article on quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in the year 1978 the physicists W. Marciano and H. Pagels and writing in particular on the Schwinger-Dyson equations for QCD, they stated that “ultimately we will have to face up to solving these equations or some equivalent problem.” These authors were of course cognizant of the fact that to understand QCD will take approaches very different than what had been done in other quantum field theories, such as quantum electrodynamics, the latter of which can be tackled successfully using perturbation theory. Of course, the property of asymptotic freedom in QCD allows one to do perturbation calculations at high enough energy, and useful insights may be obtained from these equations, but if one is to understand non-perturbative phenomena, such as bound states, then one has to make use of techniques outside the context of perturbation theory.As the content of this book illustrates with great clarity, much has happened in the field since 1978, not only in the discovery of non-perturbative techniques such as lattice gauge theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence, but also in the experimental techniques such as heavy ion collisions. Indeed all these developments have been interesting and no doubt will continue to give surprising results in the years ahead.For those interested in non-perturbative quantum field theory, either as a profession or from the standpoint of a spectator, there is much to be gained from studying this book. The authors keep the physics to the forefront, and despite the fact that they frequently have to refer the reader to the research literature for details on calculations, this book should not be viewed as a literature survey. And even though the authors clearly want to advertise the virtues of using the AdS/CFT correspondence to understand QCD, they do not hesitate to point out the problems in using this correspondence. They also discuss in great detail some of the gaps in understanding in the experiments dealing with heavy ion collisions (and do a through job of motivating the experimental situation in the first two chapters of the book).Some of the discussions/results that the reader may find interesting or surprising include:1. The breakdown of the eikonal formalism in describing parton energy loss in heavy ion collisions (due to the partons themselves being created in the collisions and suffering energy loss in the medium created). The resulting ‘jet quenching” of partons as they move through dense matter is a challenge to theorists and is to be contrasted with the perturbation theory calculation that can be done for parton showers in a vacuum. The authors describe a simple jet quenching model in Chapter 2, and refer the reader to the literature for estimates based on Monte Carlo simulations.2. The phenomenon (ala the Matsui/Satz model) of ‘color screening’ in preventing meson production in the hot quark-gluon plasma, and approaches to estimating the screening length for the quark-antiquark force.3. Although their vacuum solutions are very different, QCD and N = 4 Super Yang-Mills theory have similar properties above the critical temperature Tc, which is defined to be the crossover temperature from a hadron gas to a quark-gluon plasma. QCD is no longer confining above Tc. The authors give a comprehensive list of their similarities and differences at nonzero temperatures. Most interesting is that the authors show that the ratio between the shear viscosity and the entropy density does not depend on the number of degrees of freedom, the latter of which are not equal for these two theories. And even though SUSY is not present in QCD, at finite temperature the difference between bosons and fermions can be ignored. However the interplay between the number of flavors and the number of colors remains important. Readers hungry for a research problem using gauge/string duality can try extending the methods in this book to the case where the number of colors are comparable to the number of flavors.4. The absence of quasiparticles in the strongly coupled N = 4 SYM plasma. The quasiparticle picture has of course dominated applications of quantum field theory to condensed matter and many-body systems. This paradigm finally goes away when there is strong coupling between the constituents of the system.5. The authors show that thermodynamic quantities do not vary much between weakly and strongly coupled non-Abelian gauge theory plasmas.6. The extensive discussion on the physics of holographic mesons (quarkonium mesons), given much needed understanding of the properties of (strongly coupled) hot QCD.The book therefore gives a good update on what techniques are available for studying non-perturbative QCD. With further work and possibly even more exotic mathematical techniques, researchers may be closing in on the major unsolved problem of quantum field theory. In the same article in 1978, Marciano and Pagels remark that “no one has ever proven the existence of a single bound state let alone the confinement property in any relativistic, 3 + 1 dimensional quantum field theory”.

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