Holographic Heavy Ion Collisions in Non-Conformal Theories


Presenting author: Miguel Zilhao

authors: Maximilian Attems, Jorge Casalderrey-Solana, David Mateos, Daniel Santos-Olivan, Carlos F. Sopuerta, Miquel Triana, Miguel Zilhao abstract: Understanding the dynamics of out-of-equilibrium matter in strongly coupled systems is an important and challenging problem in theoretical physics. A particularly interesting example is the Quark-Gluon Plasma formed in relativistic colliders such as RHIC or the LHC, which motivates the study of the relaxation process in strongly coupled non-abelian field theories. We use holography to map the evolution of plasma in a non-conformal gauge theory to a gravitational system, namely to the collision of two gravitational shockwaves in Einstein-scalar field theory with an asymptotically Anti-de Sitter geometry, and study the effect of the non-conformality in the relaxation times of the resulting plasma.