Money and the international monetary system

International finance ; Money ; Heller, H. Robert

Improving America's competitiveness

Go metric and remove barriers to nationwide branch banking: these are the best ways to improve U.S. export performance in world markets.Balance of trade ; Competition ; Dollar

Equilibration rates in a strongly coupled nonconformal quark-gluon plasma

We initiate the study of equilibration rates of strongly coupled quark-gluon plasmas in the absence of conformal symmetry. We primarily consider a supersymmetric mass deformation within ${\cal N}=2^{*}$ gauge theory and use holography to compute quasinormal modes of a variety of scalar operators, as well as the energy-momentum tensor. In each case, the lowest quasinormal frequency, which provides an approximate upper bound on the thermalization time, is proportional to temperature, up to a pre-factor with only a mild temperature dependence. We find similar behaviour in other holographic plasmas, where the model contains an additional scale beyond the temperature. Hence, our study suggests that the thermalization time is generically set by the temperature, irrespective of any other scales, in strongly coupled gauge theories.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

sQGP as hCFT

We examine the proposal to make quantitative comparisons between the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma and holographic descriptions of conformal field theory. In this note, we calculate corrections to certain transport coefficients appearing in second-order hydrodynamics from higher curvature terms to the dual gravity theory. We also clarify how these results might be consistently applied in comparisons with the sQGP.Comment: 13 page