Physics & Astronomy Colloquium

Speaker: Wilke van der Schee

Title: A holographic view of quark-gluon plasma

Abstract: At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, lead nuclei are collided at unprecedented ultra-relativistic energies. The debris at these collisions quickly forms a quark-gluon plasma, which is described by a strongly interacting quantum field theory (QFT) with the smallest shear viscosity known in nature. Somewhat coincidentally, modern research in string theory and quantum gravity led to the realization that the dynamics of temperature and entropy present on black hole horizons is precisely described by such a strongly interacting QFT, giving rise to a framework now called holography. This talk will introduce the physics of both quark-gluon plasma and holography, in particular highlighting their connection and how studying black hole dynamics can hence lead to insights into the dynamics of quark-gluon plasma.