Black hole production in gravity duals and experimental implications for QCD and RHIC

First lecture: Formalism for black hole formation in gravitational shockwave collisions and gauge theory results using AdS-CFT.

Abstract: High energy (high s, fixed t) collisions above the Planck scale in a gravitational theory are approximated by gravitational shockwave collisions. I show how one can find black hole formation in such a collision, and calculate (a lower bound on) the total cross section. I apply this formalism for gravity duals and show how to use AdS-CFT a la Polchinski-Strassler to find results in gauge theories


Second lecture: Applications to QCD and the real world; the duality between black holes and hot "fireballs" in QCD.

Abstract: I continue the description of high energy collisions in gauge theories via AdS-CFT. I apply the results obtained to real world QCD and argue that the analysis continues to be valid. I show that the "fireballs" observed at RHIC are dual to black holes situated on the IR brane in the gravity dual. I show that this can be possible by proving that a simple toy model for the fireball, a scalar field theory solution, the "pionless hole", has the same properties as the dual black hole, including Hawking radiation at a fixed and calculable temperature. I study the properties of the fireballs from the dual black holes and show the differences from the usual finite temperature case of Witten