HEAVY ION COLLISIONS AND BLACK HOLE DYNAMICS
Abstract
Relativistic heavy ion collisions create a strongly coupled quark–gluon plasma. Some of the plasma's properties can be approximately understood in terms of a dual black hole. These properties include shear viscosity, thermalization time, and drag force on heavy quarks. They are hard to calculate from first principles in QCD.
Extracting predictions about quark–gluon plasmas from dual black holes mostly involves solving Einstein's equations and classical string equations of motion. AdS/CFT provides a translation from gravitational calculations to gauge theory predictions. The gauge theory to which the predictions apply is 
super-Yang–Mills theory. QCD is different in many respects from super-Yang–Mills, but it seems that its high temperature properties are similar enough for us to make some meaningful comparisons.
This essay was awarded the 3rd Prize in the 2007 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation. It is a republication of Gen. Relativ. Gravit.39 (2007) 1533.
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