Towards a theory of the semi-Quark Gluon Plasma

I give a general overview of the theory of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) about the temperature for deconfinement, where the theory is only partially deconfined. I review three topics relevant to study of such a “semi”-QGP. The first is the semi-classical computation of the spatial 't Hooft loop. This is equivalent to computing the interface tension between two Z(N) domains, and indicates how the confined phase is approached from high temperature. The second topic is effective matrix models of Polyakov loops. The last topic is the computation of hard thermal loops in the presence of a spatial 't Hooft loop, as a way of probing the real time properties of the semi-QGP.