Recent Theoretical Developments in Strongly Coupled QCD

Heavy-ion collisions involve strongly coupled dynamics of QCD in the entire history of time evolution. We review recent theoretical efforts to meet this challenge, focusing on the two approaches that the speaker has contributed to:

1. Holography or AdS/CFT correspondence, and 2) Symmetry protected phenomena such as those originating from triangle anomaly. The presentation is oriented to non-experts on these fields, and hence relies on intuitive pictures of the methods and the results, without going into specific details.