Gauge/gravity duality and thermalization of a boost-invariant perfect fluid

Jun, 2006
4 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Rev.D 74 (2006) 046007
e-Print:

Citations per year

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Abstract:
We derive the equation for the quasi-normal modes corresponding to the scalar excitation of a black hole moving away in the fifth dimension. This geometry is the AdS/CFT dual of a boost-invariant expanding perfect fluid in N=4 SUSY Yang-Mills theory at large proper-time. On the gauge-theory side, the dominant solution of the equation describes the decay back to equilibrium of a scalar excitation of the perfect fluid. Its characteristic proper-time can be interpreted as a thermalization time of the perfect fluid, which is a universal (and numerically small) constant in units of the unique scale of the problem. This may provide a new insight on the short thermalization-time puzzle encountered in heavy-ion collision phenomenology. A nontrivial scaling behaviour in proper-time is obtained which can be interpreted in terms of a slowly varying adiabatic approximation.
Note:
  • 11 pages, no figures: v2: misprints corrected, results unchanged: v3: reference added
  • 11.25.Tq
  • 12.38.Mh
  • space-time
  • dimension: 5
  • field theory: scalar
  • Einstein equation: solution
  • black hole: quasinormal mode
  • field theory: conformal
  • gauge field theory: Yang-Mills
  • supersymmetry