Applied String Theory, Hot and Cold: A Holographic View on Quark-Gluon Plasma and Superfluids

This thesis deals with applications of gauge/gravity duality to strong-coupling phenomena in the quark-gluon plasma and far-from-equilibrium superfluids. In a first part we search for model-independent (universal) behavior in various non-Abelian gauge-theory plasmas at finite temperature and chemical potential. We employ the holographic duals of strongly coupled N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and three one-parameter families of non-conformal deformations thereof, two of which solve the equations of motion of a five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell-scalar action. We study the free energy and associated thermodynamic quantities of heavy quarks and bound quark-anti-quark (QQ) pairs as well as the QQ binding energy and the running coupling. We find qualitative agreement with available lattice QCD data. Moreover, we show that several observables exhibit universal behavior for all values of the chemical potential. In a second part we investigate the real-time dynamics of a bosonic superfluid in two spatial dimensions after initial quenches that take the system to far-from-equilibrium states characterized by many topological vortex defects in association with quantum turbulence. To this end we numerically solve the full equations of motion of the holographically dual Abelian Higgs model on four-dimensional anti-de Sitter space. We observe a universal non-equilibrium late-time regime characterized by power-law behavior in a two-point correlation function and in characteristic length scales, which we interpret as a non-thermal fixed point