Modeling Heavy Ion Collisions in AdS/CFT

dc.creatorAlbacete, Javier L.
dc.creatorKovchegov, Yuri V.
dc.creatorTaliotis, Anastasios
dc.date2008-05-19
dc.date2008-09-09
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T11:50:55Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T11:50:55Z
dc.descriptionWe construct a model of high energy heavy ion collisions as two ultrarelativistic shock waves colliding in AdS_5. We point out that shock waves corresponding to physical energy-momentum tensors of the nuclei completely stop almost immediately after the collision in AdS_5, which, on the field theory side, corresponds to complete nuclear stopping due to strong coupling effects, likely leading to Landau hydrodynamics. Since in real-life heavy ion collisions the large Bjorken x part of nuclear wave functions continues to move along the light cone trajectories of the incoming nuclei leaving the small-x partons behind, we conclude that a pure large coupling approach is not likely to adequately model nuclear collisions. We show that to account for small-coupling effects one can model the colliding nuclei by two (unphysical) ultrarelativistic shock waves with zero net energy each (but with non-zero energy density). We use this model to study the energy density of the strongly-coupled matter created immediately after the collision. We argue that expansion of the energy density in the powers of proper time squared corresponds on the gravity side to a perturbative expansion of the metric in graviton exchanges. Using such expansion we reproduce our earlier result that the energy density of produced matter at mid-rapidity starts out as a constant (of time) in heavy ion collisions at large coupling.
dc.description34 pages, 3 figures. One sentence modified and Appendix B revised
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2927
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2927
dc.identifierJHEP0807:100,2008
dc.identifierdoi:10.1088/1126-6708/2008/07/100
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/203724
dc.subjectHigh Energy Physics - Theory
dc.subjectHigh Energy Physics - Phenomenology
dc.subjectNuclear Theory
dc.titleModeling Heavy Ion Collisions in AdS/CFT
dc.typetext

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