Toward the AdS/CFT dual of the "Little Bang"

This (rather subjective) review sums up few years of work devoted to explain various aspects of high energy heavy ion collisions using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The central issue of is is formation of the trapped surface (black hole) phenomenon, seen by a distant observer as the entropy production. We end up discussing an issue of classical gravitational radiation by an ultrarelativistic falling body and the so called breaking self-force related to it.Comment: a review to appear in topical volume of reviews collected by editors, S.Bass and G.Casaladerrey-Solan

Holographic Lessons for Quark Dynamics

We give a brief overview of recent results obtained through the gauge/gravity correspondence, concerning the propagation of a heavy quark in strongly-coupled conformal field theories (such as N=4 super-Yang-Mills), both at zero and finite temperature. In the vacuum, we discuss energy loss, radiation damping, signal propagation and radiation-induced fluctuations. In the presence of a thermal plasma, our emphasis is on early-time energy loss, screening and quark-antiquark evolution after pair creation. Throughout, quark dynamics is seen to be efficiently encapsulated in the usual string worldsheet dynamics.Comment: Invited review for a Journal of Physics G topical volume on gauge/gravity duality applications to QCD matter and ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. v2: Reference adde