Speaker
Description
We explain the approach to thermal equilibrium of strongly coupled non-conformal plasmas using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The theories we study are the holographic duals to Einstein gravity coupled to a scalar with an exponential potential. The coefficient in the exponent, X, is the parameter that controls the deviation from the conformally invariant case. For these models we obtain analytic solutions for the plasma expansion in the late-time limit, under the assumption of boost-invariance, and we determine the scaling behaviour of the energy density, pressure, and temperature as a function of time, which is found to agree with the hydrodynamical expectation. We find that the temperature decays as a function of proper time as $T \sim τ^{−s/4}$ with the exponent s determined in terms of the nonconformality parameter X as $s = 4(1−4X$2)/3$.
