Gauge/gravity duality has became an important tool for the investigation of strongly interacting systems. Its early success is in the physics of heavy ion collisions, where models with gravity duals are used to study qualitative and quantitative aspects of the quark gluon plasma. Recently, insights from gauge/gravity duality have became useful in some problems of condensed matter physics. This series of talks reviews some of these applications. Professor Dam Son was the first to utilize techniques from string theory to address current problems in nuclear physics. In particular he (and collaborators) showed that a thermal state of strongly coupled deconfined gluons has a relatively small shear viscosity, in agreement with experimental evidence from the Brookhaven national collider.

Program of Lectures