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Energy Momentum Tensor Correlators in Improved Holographic QCD

In this thesis, we study the physics of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) using holographic methods borrowed from string theory. We start our discussion by motivating the use of such machinery, explaining how recent experimental results from the LHC and RHIC colliders suggests that the created QGP should be described as a strongly coupled liquid with small but nonvanishing bulk and shear viscosities. We argue that holographic dualities are a very efficient framework for studying transport properties in such a medium. Next, we introduce the underlying physics behind all holographic dualities, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and then motivate the necessity of implementing conformal invariance breaking in them. After this, we present the phenomenologically most successful holographic model of the strong interactions - Improved Holographic QCD (IHQCD). Working within IHQCD, we next move on to calculate energy momentum tensor correlators in the bulk and shear channels of large-Nc Yang-Mills theory. In the shear channel, we confront our results with those derived in strongly coupled N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory as well as weakly interacting ordinary Yang-Mills theory. Close to the critical temperature of the deconfinement transition, we observe significant effects of conformal invariance breaking. In the bulk channel, where the conformal result is trivial, we make comparisons with both perturbative and lattice QCD. We observe that lattice data seem to favor our holographic prediction over the perturbative one over a wide range of temperatures.