Speaker
Paul Chesler
(MIT)
Description
A remarkable result from heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and Large Hadron Collider is that, shortly after the collision event, the quark-gluon plasma produced behaves as a nearly ideal liquid. Understanding the dynamics responsible for such rapid "hydroization" is a challenge using traditional perturbative field theory. In recent years holography has emerged as a powerful tool to study non-equilibrium phenomena, mapping the dynamics of certain quantum field theories onto the dynamics of semi-classical gravity. Via holography, the production of quark-gluon plasma maps onto the process of gravitational collapse and black hole formation, with the relaxation of the black hole's gravitational field encoding hydroization of the dual quark gluon plasma. Thermalization of the quark-gluon plasma is encoded in the thermalization of the black hole's Hawking radiation. I will describe several processes which mimic heavy ion collisions and present results for both hydroization and thermalization times and mechanisms.
Primary author
Paul Chesler
(MIT)
