The fluid/gravity correspondence: Lectures notes from the 2008 Summer School on Particles, Fields, and Strings

This is a paper compiled by students of the 2008 Summer School on Particles, Fields, and Strings held at the University of British Columbia on lectures given by Veronika Hubeny as understood and interpreted by the authors. We start with an introduction to the AdS/CFT duality. More specifically, we discuss the correspondence between relativistic, conformal hydrodynamics and Einstein's theory of gravity. Within our framework the Einstein equations are an effective description for the string theory in the bulk of AdS_5 spacetime and the hydrodynamic fluid equations represent the conformal field theory near thermal equilibrium on the boundary. In particular we present a new technique for calculating properties in fluid dynamics using the stress-energy tensor induced on the boundary, by the gravitational field in the bulk, and comparing it with the form of the stress-energy tensor from hydrodynamics. A detailed treatment can be found in [JHEP 02 (2008) 045] and [arXiv:0803.2526].