Gauge/gravity duality and near-equilibrium regime of strongly coupled thermal gauge theories

The focus of the proposed research is the intriguing connection between the physics of black holes and the properties of finite temperature gauge theories (gauge theories are the class of theories describing strong, weak and electromagnetic forces). This connection is known as the holographic gauge/gravity duality. The duality can be used as a tool to access the so called nonperturbative regime of gauge theories where other available theoretical methods are not effective. This is especially important for processes involving hot and dense nuclear matter out of thermal equilibrium i.e. precisely the conditions created in heavy ion collision experiments currently underway at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Experimental data strongly suggests that the matter in these collisions exists in the regime described by a nonperturbative gauge theory. In the absence of other viable approaches, the gauge/gravity duality remains the only source of theoretical insights in this field. Computing transport coefficients such as shear and bulk viscosity, thermal conductivity, diffusion constants in various models using gravity dual description of gauge theories is of great interest for phenomenological applications. Other non-equlibrium processes such as particle emission from the expanding quark-gluon plasma fireball can be treated in this approach as well. The proposed reasearch is supposed to accumulate theoretical information relevant for the analysis of currently available and future experimental data from RHIC and (in the near future) from the heavy ion experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.