Gravitational collisions and the quark-gluon plasma

Jul 7, 2014
100 pages
Supervisors:
  • Thomas Peitzmann
    ,
  • Gleb Arutyunov
Thesis: PhD
  • Utrecht U.
(2014)
e-Print:

Citations per year

2013201620192022202502468
Abstract: (arXiv)
This thesis addresses the thermalisation of heavy-ion collisions within the context of the AdS/CFT duality. The first part clarifies the numerical set-up and studies the relaxation of far-from-equilibrium modes in homogeneous systems. Less trivially we then study colliding shock waves and uncover a transparent regime where the strongly coupled shocks initially pass right through each other. Furthermore, in this regime the later plasma relaxation is insensitive to the longitudinal profile of the shock, implying in particular a universal rapidity shape at strong coupling and high collision energies. Lastly, we study radial expansion in a boost-invariant set-up, allowing us to find good agreement with head-on collisions performed at the LHC accelerator. As a secondary goal of this thesis, a special effort is made to clearly expose numerical computations by providing commented Mathematica notebooks for most calculations presented. Furthermore, we provide interpolating functions of the geometries computed, which can be of use in other projects.
Note:
  • quark gluon: plasma
  • field theory: conformal
  • heavy ion: scattering
  • strong coupling
  • AdS/CFT correspondence
  • numerical calculations
  • CERN LHC Coll
  • accelerator
  • shock waves
  • rapidity
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