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Ads/Cft Correspondence And Hydrodynamics Of Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions, James Ethan Alsup

Doctoral Dissertations

The experiments performed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab have discovered a state of matter called the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (sQGP). The strong coupling has limited the ability of the standard theory to describe such matter, namely Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). However, string theory's anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence has provided a new way to study the situation and in an analytical manner. So far, hydrodynamic properties of RHIC's plasma, such as elliptic flow and longitudinal expansion, have been seen to follow from classical supergravity calculations. In this dissertation I discuss some of the …