We estimate the stopping length of an energetic gluon in a thermal plasma of strongly coupled N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory by representing the gluon as a doubled string rising up out of the horizon. March 2008

The N = 1 superconformal field theories that arise in AdS-CFT from placing a stack of D3-branes at the singularity of a toric Calabi-Yau threefold can be described succinctly by dimer models. We present an efficient algorithm for constructing a dimer model from the geometry of the Calabi-Yau. Since not all dimers produce consistent field theories, we perform several consistency checks on the field theories produced by our algorithm: they have the correct number of gauge groups, their cubic anomalies agree with the Chern-Simons coefficients in the AdS dual, and all gauge invariant chiral operators satisfy the unitarity bound. We also give bounds on the ratio of the central charge of the theory to the area of the toric diagram. To prove these results, we introduce the concept of a properly ordered dimer.

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We consider N = 3 supersymmetric Chern-Simons (CS) theories that contain product U (N ) gauge groups and bifundamental matter fields. Using the matrix model of Kapustin, Willett and Yaakov, we examine the Euclidean partition function of these theories on an S 3 in the large N limit. We show that the only such CS theories for which the long range forces between the eigenvalues cancel have quivers which are in one-to-one correspondence with the simply laced affine Dynkin diagrams. As the A n series was studied in detail before, in this paper we compute the partition function for the D 4 quiver. The D 4 example gives further evidence for a conjecture that the saddle point eigenvalue distribution is determined by the distribution of gauge invariant chiral operators. We also see that the partition function is invariant under a generalized Seiberg duality for CS theories.

Using the gravity side of the AdS/CFT correspondence, we investigate the analytic properties of thermal retarded Green's functions for scalars, conserved currents, the stress tensor, and massless fermions. We provide some results concerning their large and small frequency behavior and their pole structure. From these results, it is straightforward to prove the validity of various sum rules on the field theory side of the duality. We introduce a novel contraction mapping we use to study the large frequency behavior of the Green's functions.