Robert Myers - Quark soup al dente

- Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
- What has RHIC taught us? Why superstring theory?

- QCD, a matrix-valued version of electromagnetism
- running coupling constant, quark confinement (one of the Clay millennium prizes), analytical techniques fail:
	- use lattice QCD
	- study QCD at high density or high temperature (asymptotic freedom)
		- high temperature: hadron gas, early universe
		- high temperature/density: quark-gluon plasma
		- high density: compact stars, color superconductor
- after RHIC collision, observe explosion of thermally balanced quark-gluon plasma _fluid_
	- 0.75 of free-gas energy above crossover temperature is predicted by numerical simulations
	- similar prediction by string theory AdS/CFT
- new theoretical directions: jet quenching, quark diffusion, spectral functions, finite quark density, heavy meson suppression
- new experimental directions: LHC