München 2009 – scientific programme

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GR: Fachverband Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie

GR 8: Hauptvorträge Donnerstag

GR 8.2: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 12, 2009, 09:10–09:50, A214

Anti-de Sitter black holes dual to thermal quantum field theories — •Johanna Erdmenger — Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, München

We discuss the duality between classical gravity in an Anti-de Sitter black hole background and quantum field theory at finite temperature. This duality arises from string theory in a particular saddle point approximation. Using this duality, it is possible to calculate observables for strongly coupled plasmas which are similar to the quark-gluon plasma studied at heavy-ion colliders. In particular, it is possible to describe the dynamical behaviour of mesons (quark-antiquark bound states) in the plasma by embedding additional hypersurfaces (D-branes) into the black hole background. A geometrical first-order phase transition appears which is interpreted as meson melting. Moreover, results for meson spectral functions at finite density are presented within this approach. We also comment on the description of non-equilibrium field theory with a collapsing matter shell in Anti-de Sitter space.