Hosted by: Yoshitaka Hatta

Abstract: This talk discusses some recent results in the thermodynamics of QCD in the limit where the number of colors,Nc, is large. It has long been known that there are very strong reasons to believe that large Nc QCD, unlike QCD with Nc=3, has a first order phase transition at zero chemical potential. This implies the existence of metastable superheated and supercooled regimes. Recently some remarkable properties of these phases have been elucidated, most dramatically the fact that the metastable supercoloed plasma phase at large Nc will have negative absolute pressure—a pressure below that of the vacuum.