ar X iv : 0 80 4 . 24 23 v 1 [ he p - th ] 1 5 A pr 2 00 8 Quark Soup al dente : Applied Superstring Theory

In recent years, experiments have discovered an exotic new state of matter known as the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (sQGP). At present, it seems that standard theoretical tools, such as perturbation theory and lattice gauge theory, are poorly suited to understand this new phase. However, recent progress in superstring theory has provided us with a theoretical laboratory for studying very similar systems of strongly interacting hot non-abelian plasmas. This surprising new perspective extracts the fluid properties of the sQGP from physical processes in a black hole spacetime. Hence we may find the answers to difficult particle physics questions about the sQGP from straightforward calculations in classical general relativity. Quark Soup al dente 2