Thermal duality and Hagedorn transition from p-adic strings.

We develop the finite temperature theory of p-adic string models. We find that the thermal properties of these nonlocal field theories can be interpreted either as contributions of standard thermal modes with energies proportional to the temperature, or inverse thermal modes with energies proportional to the inverse of the temperature, leading to a thermal duality at leading order (genus one) analogous to the well-known T duality of string theory. The p-adic strings also recover the asymptotic limits (high and low temperature) for arbitrary genus that purely stringy calculations have yielded.

Low mass dimuons produced in relativistic nuclear collisions.

The NA60 experiment has measured low mass muon pair production in In-In collisions at 158A GeV with unprecedented precision. We show that these data are reproduced very well by a dynamical model with parameters scaled from fits to measurements of hadronic transverse mass spectra and Hanbury Brown-Twiss correlations in Pb-Pb and Pb-Au collisions at the same energy. The data are consistent with in-medium properties of rho and omega mesons at finite temperature and density as deduced from empirical forward-scattering amplitudes.

Strongly interacting low-viscosity matter created in relativistic nuclear collisions.

Substantial collective flow is observed in collisions between large nuclei at BNL RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) as evidenced by single-particle transverse momentum distributions and by azimuthal correlations among the produced particles. The data are well reproduced by perfect fluid dynamics. A calculation of the dimensionless ratio of shear viscosity eta to entropy density s by Kovtun, Son, and Starinets within anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory yields eta/s=variant Planck's over 2pi/4pikB, which has been conjectured to be a lower bound for any physical system.