Thermodynamics of the N=2* strongly coupled plasma

Gauge/string duality is a potentially important framework for addressing the properties of the strongly coupled quark gluon plasma produced at RHIC. However, constructing an actual string theory dual to QCD has so far proven elusive. In this paper, we take a partial step towards exploring the QCD plasma by investigating the thermodynamics of a non-conformal system, namely the N = 2* theory, which is obtained as a mass deformation of the conformal N = 4 gauge theory. We find that at temperatures of order the mass scale, the thermodynamics of the mass deformed plasma is surprisingly close to that of the conformal gauge theory plasma. This suggests that many properties of the quark gluon plasma at RHIC may in fact be well described by even relatively simple models such as that of the conformal N = 4 plasma. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.