Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
8-2010
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
Physics
Major Professor
George Siopsis
Committee Members
Yuri Kamyshkov, Soren Sorensen, Carl Sundberg
Abstract
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 field's development as well as the research done by the author and collaborators.
Recommended Citation
Alsup, James Ethan, "AdS/CFT Correspondence and Hydrodynamics of Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2010.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/772