Unequal-time correlations in the quark-gluon plasma

by Kirill Boguslavski (University of Heidelberg)

Tuesday 2 Jun 2026, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/Zurich

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

In the aftermath of heavy-ion collisions, the formation of the quark-gluon plasma is preceded by a short-lived, highly energetic medium that evolves toward hydrodynamization. Unequal-time correlation functions offer a powerful probe of the collective and transport properties of this QCD matter, as they encode its full excitation spectrum. In this talk, I will discuss their implications for the applicability of kinetic theory and, using the heavy-quark diffusion coefficient as a case study, for the microscopic origin of transport properties relevant to hard probes. I will also address how such correlations can be computed beyond classical-statistical approximations in full quantum field theory. Recent progress in the real-time complex Langevin method has enabled the first ab-initio computation of unequal-time correlation functions in 3+1-dimensional Yang-Mills theory, opening a promising quantum route to studying the quark-gluon plasma.