Energy momentum tensor correlators in hot Yang-Mills theory: holography confronts lattice and perturbation theory

We investigate the behavior of energy momentum tensor correlators in strongly coupled large-N_c Yang-Mills theory at nonzero temperature, working within the Improved Holographic QCD model. In particular, we determine the spectral functions and corresponding imaginary time correlators in the bulk and shear channels, and compare the results to recent perturbative and lattice calculations where available. For the bulk channel imaginary time correlator, for which all three results exist, lattice data is seen to favor the holographic prediction over the perturbative one over a wide range of temperatures.

Frequency and wave number dependence of the shear correlator in strongly coupled hot Yang-Mills theory

We use AdS/QCD duality to compute the finite temperature Greens function G(omega,k;T) of the shear operator T_12 for all omega,k in hot Yang-Mills theory. The goal is to assess how the existence of scales like the transition temperature and glueball masses affects the correlator computed in the scalefree conformal N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. We observe sizeable effects for T close to T_c which rapidly disappear with increasing T. Quantitative agreement of these predictions with future lattice Monte Carlo data would suggest that QCD matter in this temperature range is strongly interacting.