Hydrodynamic Flow of the Quark-Gluon Plasma and Gauge/Gravity Correspondence

Michal P. Heller, Romuald A. Janik, R. Peschanski

Published 2008-11-19, updated 2009-06-24Version 2

The contribution presents a summary of the Gauge/Gravity approach to the study of hydrodynamic flow of the quark-gluon plasma formed in heavy-ion collisions. Considering the ideal case of a supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory for which the AdS/CFT correspondence gives a precise form of the Gauge/Gravity duality, the properties of the strongly coupled expanding plasma are put in one-to-one correspondence with the metric of a 5-dimensional black hole moving away in the 5th dimension and its deformations consistent with the relevant Einstein equations. Several recently studied aspects of this framework are recalled and put in perspective. This paper is a written version of the four lectures given by the authors on that subject.