Gauge/string duality applied to heavy ion collisions: Limitations, insights and prospects

TL;DR

This paper reviews how gauge/string duality offers insights into quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions, highlighting its limitations and potential despite current precision issues.

Contribution

It critically examines the conceptual limitations of gauge/string duality for QCD and discusses its qualitative and quantitative insights into heavy ion phenomenology.

Findings

Duality provides valuable qualitative insights into QGP behavior.

Limitations prevent it from being a precise tool for QCD.

Examples illustrate potential future applications.

Abstract

Over the last decade a fruitful interplay has developed between analyses of strongly coupled non-abelian plasmas via the gauge/string duality and the phenomenology of the quark-gluon plasma created in heavy ion collisions. I review the reasons why the gauge/string duality is not a precision tool for QCD physics at present, with emphasis on conceptual issues. I then argue that, nevertheless, the duality can provide valuable insights at both the quantitive and the qualitative level. I illustrate this with a few examples, and conclude with a brief discussion of future prospects.