Deconfinement and Thermodynamics in Improved Holographic QCD

The glueball spectrum and thermodynamics of 5D dilaton gravity duals to confining gauge theories is explored. We show that they exhibit a first order Hawking-Page type phase transition. For the transition temperature, we find Tc = 280 MeV. The temperature dependence of various thermodynamic quantities such as the pressure, entropy and speed of sound is calculated. The results are in agreement with the corresponding lattice data.