Time-dependent AdS/CFT correspondence and the Quark-Gluon plasma
Alice Bernamonti, Robi Peschanski
备注：
27 pages, 8 figures, based on the lectures given by R.P. at the 2010 Cargese Summer School (June 21-July 3), to appear in the proceedings. References added and corrected relaxation time eq. (56)
Experiments on high-energy heavy-ion collisions reveal the formation and some intriguing properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), a new phase of matter predicted by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the quantum field theory of strong interactions. The phenomenological success of relativistic hydrodynamic simulations with remarkably weak shear viscosity, modeling QGP as an almost perfect fluid, are in favor of the occurrence of a strongly-coupled QGP expanding and cooling during the reaction. A derivation of these features in QCD at strong coupling is still lacking and represents a very intricate theoretical challenge. As a quite unique modern tool to relate these dynamical features to a microscopic gauge field theory at strong coupling, time-dependent realizations of the AdS/CFT correspondence provide a fruitful way to study these properties in a realistic kinematic configuration. Relating a 4-dimensional Yang-Mills gauge theory with four supersymmetries (which is a conformal field theory, CFT) with gravity in Anti-de Sitter space in five dimensions (AdS), the AdS/CFT correspondence provides a useful "laboratory" to study yet unknown strong coupling properties of QCD. Besides the interest of revealing new aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence in a dynamical set-up, the application to plasma formation leads to non trivial theoretical properties, as we will discuss in the lectures. The highlights of the present lectures are:
1. Emergence of an (almost) perfect hydrodynamic fluid at late proper-times after the collision.
2. Duality between an expanding 4-dimensional plasma and a black hole moving radially in the bulk.
3. Intimate link between conformal hydrodynamics and Einstein's equations in the asymptotically AdS space.
4. Possibility of studying the far-from-equilibrium stage of a gauge field theory at early collisional proper-times.
This is the draft/updated version of a textbook on "real-world" applications of the AdS/CFT duality for beginning graduate students in particle physics and for researchers in the other fields. The aim of this book is to provide background materials such as string theory, general relativity, nuclear physics, nonequilibrium physics, and condensed-matter physics as well as some key applications of the AdS/CFT duality in a single textbook. Contents: (1) Introduction, (2) General relativity and black holes, (3) Black holes and thermodynamics, (4) Strong interaction and gauge theories, (5) The road …
Using the AdS/CFT correspondence we consider the retarded Green's function in the background of rotating near-extremal AdS$_4$ black holes. Following the canonical AdS/CFT dictionary into the asymptotic boundary we get a CFT$_3$ result. We also take a new route and zoom in on the near-horizon region, blow up this region and show that it yields a CFT$_2$ result. We argue that the decoupling of the near-horizon region is akin to the decoupling of the near-throat region of a D3-brane, which led to the original formulation of the AdS/CFT correspondence, thus implying that the Kerr/CFT corresponden…
Conformal deformations manifest in the AdS/CFT correspondence as boundary conditions on the AdS field. Heretofore, double-trace deformations have been the primary focus in this context. To better understand multitrace deformations, we revisit the relationship between the generating AdS partition function for a free bulk theory and the boundary CFT partition function subject to arbitrary conformal deformations. The procedure leads us to a formalism that constructs bulk fields from boundary operators. Using this formalism, we independently replicate the holographic RG flow narrative to go on to …
In this letter we examine some structural aspects of the AdS/CFT such as the way of obtaining the expectation value of product of operators of the CFT, and ideas that should be considered when a proof of AdS/CFT is under consideration.
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We introduce the AdS/CFT correspondence as a natural extension of QFT in a fixed AdS background. We start by reviewing some general concepts of CFT, including the embedding space formalism. We then consider QFT in a fixed AdS background and show that one can define boundary operators that enjoy very similar properties as in a CFT, except for the lack of a stress tensor. Including a dynamical metric in AdS generates a boundary stress tensor and completes the CFT axioms. We also discuss some applications of the bulk geometric intuition to strongly coupled QFT. Finally, we end with a review of th…
Mack has conjectured that all conformal field theories are equivalent to string theories. We explore the example of the two-dimensional minimal model CFTs and confirm that the Mellin transformed amplitudes have the desired properties of string theory in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime.
We investigate sub-AdS scale locality in a weakly coupled toy model of the AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$ correspondence. We find that this simple model has the correct density of states at low and high energies to be dual to Einstein gravity coupled to matter in AdS$_3$. Bulk correlation functions also have the correct behavior at leading order in the large $N$ expansion, but non-local effects emerge at order $1/N$. Our analysis leads to the conjecture that any large $N$ CFT$_2$ that is modular invariant and has the right low-energy density of states is dual to a gravitational theory with sub-AdS scale loca…
