I discuss the possibility that the quark-gluon plasma at strong coupling admits a description in terms of a black hole in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space. Prepared for the Proceedings of Recent Developments in Gravity – NEB XIII, Thessaloniki, Greece, June 2008. Research supported in part by the US Department of Energy under grant DE-FG05-91ER40627. E-mail: [email protected]

We present results from a detailed study of spherically symmetric Einstein-massless-scalar field dynamics with a negative cosmological constant in four to nine spacetime dimensions. This study is the first to examine dynamics in AdS beyond five dimensions and the gauge dependence of recently proposed perturbative methods. Using these perturbative methods, we provide evidence that the oscillator...

Cosmological consequences of the brane world scenario are reviewed in a pedagogical manner. According to the brane world idea, the standard model particles are confined on a hyper–surface (a so–called brane), which is embedded in a higher– dimensional spacetime (the so–called bulk). We begin our review with the simplest consistent brane world model: a single brane embedded in a five–dimensional...

Two ways in which de Sitter space can arise in supergravity theories are discussed. In the first, it arises as a solution of a conventional supergravity, in which case it necessarily has no Killing spinors. For example, de Sitter space can arise as a solution of N = 8 gauged supergravities in four or five dimensions. These lift to solutions of 11-dimensional supergravity or D = 10 IIB supergrav...

Semiclassical gravity predicts that de Sitter space has a finite entropy. We suggest a picture for Euclidean de Sitter space in string theory, and use the AdS/CFT correspondence to argue that de Sitter entropy can be understood as the number of degrees of freedom in a quantum mechanical dual.