Thermalization in gauge theories-new insights from lattice

by Sayantan Sharma (IMSc)

Thursday 26 Feb 2026, 10:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

Understanding thermalization in closed quantum systems has been
one of the outstanding challenges, which will impact our understanding of
physical processes occuring at different length scales. I will address in
my talk what do we mean by thermalization in a closed system consisting of
non-Abelian gluons. Kinetic theory approaches have given us important
insights about how hard momentum modes of gluons thermalize in presence of
a heat-bath, which is crucial for understanding the early time dynamics
in heavy-ion collisions or in the reheating epoch during cosmological
evolution of the universe. I will focus on the mechanism of how this bath
consisting of non-perturbatively interacting soft gluons of momenta
$\lesssim g^2 T$ thermalizes to begin with. Using lattice gauge theory
techniques, I will elaborate on how we can reliably estimate the typical
thermalization time of these soft gluons.