String theory and relativistic heavy ion collisions

It has long been known that string theory describes not only quantum gravity, but also gauge theories with a high degree of supersymmetry. Said gauge theories also have a large number of colors in a regime with a large effective coupling constant that does not depend on energy scale. Supersymmetry is broken in nature, if it is present at all, however the gauge theory described by string theory shares many common features with QCD at temperatures above the quark deconfinement transition. It is generally though not entirely accepted that collisions of gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) produce a thermalized Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) at temperatures distinctly above the transition temperature as determined from lattice simulations. Hence, we might hope that a string theoretic description of gauge dynamics can elucidate some otherwise intractable physics of the strongly coupled plasma.; Here we use string theory to calculate the outgoing energy flux from a RHIC process called "jet quenching", in which a high-momentum quark or gluon traverses a large distance in the QGP. Our setup is in the context of the highly supersymmetric string dual gauge theory, but we nevertheless find that the gross features of the resulting stress-energy tensor match reasonably well with experimental data. We will furthermore discuss the technology behind computations of the leading-order corrections to gauge theory observables that are uniquely string-induced, and we will describe a potential solution to string theory that could resolve a number of discrepancies between the traditional highly supersymmetric setup and QCD---in particular, a significant reduction in the amount of supersymmetry, and a finite effective coupling that is still greater than unity but does depend on energy scale.