Physics Commons^™

Thermodynamics, Hydrodynamics And Critical Phenomena In Strongly Coupled Gauge Theories, Christopher Pagnutti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The gauge theory / string theory correspondence has led to great progress in the study of strongly-coupled gauge theories. In this work, we start with a detailed treatment of some simple examples of this correspondence in order to establish some of the concepts and techniques are used on a more complicated system. We then consider a (3+1)-dimensional theory of gravity with a translationally invariant horizon, that is assumed to be dual to a (2+1)-dimensional non-conformal gauge theory at finite temperature. We study the thermodynamics of this model and find that there exists an exotic type of second-order phase transition wherein …