force are reviewed. The existence of a transition from normal nuclear matter to a novel state is motivated, and some of the traditional theoretical tools and signatures of such are described. This places the work of the first half of the thesis in context. Then the recent application of conjectured strongly-coupled methods of AdS/CFT to heavy ion physics is detailed, which the latter half of this thesis proposes to test experimentally. 

## 1.2 Experimental Measurements Leading to QCD 

Any history of science is necessarily revisionist. The path to our current un- derstanding was not straight and certainly not chronological; in fact, there were plenty of dead ends. This is of course not what we as physicists would like to think, and in our attempt to make sense of the past the work of many is elided while a lucky few are picked out as the representatives for the discovery of now-obvious results. As this is not a thesis on the history of physics I will, with some regret, continue in this tradition; additionally I will focus on the developments leading to QCD as the fundamental theory of the strong force. For a more detailed narrative of physics from the late 19th century and beyond see, e.g., [5–7] and references therein. 

Reaching all the way back to the Greeks again, Leucippus and his pupil Democritus were the first to postulate atomic theory: matter (as opposed to the void) is made up of indestructible, individual particles [8]. It took until 

