Just as a follow up to my post on the string theory & RHIC workshop Columbia, the cover article of this week’s Science News is about the “duality” between gravity and gauge theories which has turned out to be one of the hottest topics for RHIC physics. The idea is that theorists can use gravity models to do things with strongly-coupled systems of quarks and gluons that they thought would require heroicially complicated quantum field theory calculations. One particular calculation from 2001 found that there is a lower bound on the viscosity of a strongly interacting system, and RHIC physicists have been putting enormous efforts into proving or disproving the bound in a real physical system. That this could be the first application of string theory in the real world has made both experimentalists and theorists excited, and given a lot of focus to the LHC heavy ion program (of which I am a part — an embattled part, but a part nonetheless!)
In any case, this is a nice human-readable article summarizing the state of the field, with only a factual errors that I noticed on first glance. Have a look!
