A black hole effective theory for strongly interacting matter

We establish a new tool for studying strongly coupled matter: an effective theory of black holes in gravity, which maps to a hydrodynamic description of field theories via the gauge-gravity duality. Our approach is inspired by previously known effective theories found in the limit of high number of dimensions. We argue that the new approach can accurately describe phase transitions in a wide class of theories, such as the Yang-Mills and other nearly critical field theories. As an application, we analyze the interface between confining and deconfining phases in holographic Yang-Mills theory.