Novel approaches to the physics of the quark-gluon plasma

The purpose of the project "Novel perturbative and non-perturbative approaches to the physics of the quark-gluon plasma" is to explore, develop and apply new calculational methods relevant for the physics of thermal QCD and especially heavy-ion collisions. The methodology of the research is that of first principles analytical calculations that are based on one hand on the well-established machinery of perturbation theory and on novel uses of resummation techniques, and on the other hand on the famous AdS-CFT conjecture. On the perturbative side, the applicability of the results relies on the asymptotic freedom of QCD that guarantees that at sufficiently high energy scales the gauge coupling constant tends to zero facilitating the expansion of various physical quantities in generalized (asymptotic) power series in this parameter. The AdS-CFT conjecture, on the other hand, is based on an abundance of indirect evidence suggesting a duality between a type IIB string theory formulated in ten- dimensional anti-de Sitter space and a conformal N=4 super-Yang Mills theory living on the boundary of the spacetime. The conjecture is by now generally accepted and very widely used, though still remains to be rigorously proven. Planned research topics include the determination of the order g^6 term in the weak coupling expansion of the pressure of hot QCD as well as further developing a recently formulated, efficient resummation scheme that captures the thermodynamics of strongly interacting matter at large quark number densities and small temperatures. Another goal is to study different ways of utilizing the AdS-CFT duality as well as weak-coupling techniques within the super-Yang-Mills theory to obtain both qualitative and quantitative information relevant for the physics of the quark-gluon plasma. A concrete example of novel research in this direction is the study of the so-called non- Fermi-liquidity within the super-Yang-Mills theory at both weak and strong coupling.