Strong interactions and gauge-string duality

We discuss some recent phenomenological models for strong interactions based on the idea of gauge/string duality. A very good estimate for hadronic masses can be found by placing an infrared cut off in AdS space. Considering static strings in this geometry one can also reproduce the phenomenological Cornell potential for a quark anti-quark pair at zero temperature. Placing static strings in an AdS Schwarzschild space with an infrared cut off one finds a transition from a confining to a deconfining phase at some critical horizon radius (associated with temperature).