Color Glass to Color Fluid: Thermalization in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions

by Mr Raju Venugopalan (BNL, CFNS Stony Brook, and Higgs Center, Univ. of Edinburgh)

Wednesday 13 May 2026, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

From a first principles QFT perspective, the problem of thermalization in heavy-ion collisions may appear to be intractable. However, at very high energies, a semi-classical "shockwave" description of ultrarelativistic nuclei (and their scattering) emerges, described by the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) EFT. We first discuss how such shockwaves form in QCD, and how they decay, and the rich insights provided by examining this process in the language of broken global symmetries. We then discuss multi-particle production in collisions of the shockwave coherent states. The radiated glue initially forms a far-from-equilibrium Glasma, which can be understood as a generalized Susskind-Glogower squeezed state. The subsequent evolution of the Glasma after it decoheres is characterized by turbulent IR and UV flows with universal features in common with ultracold atomic gases. We discuss some of the unresolved open questions in this description of thermalization in heavy-ion collisions. 

Recording