English

On the collision of two shock waves in AdS5

High Energy Physics - Theory 2014-11-18 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We consider two ultrarelativistic shock waves propagating and colliding in five-dimensional Anti-de-Sitter spacetime. By transforming to Rosen coordinates, we are able to find the form of the metric shortly after the collision. Using holographic renormalization, we calculate the energy-momentum tensor on the boundary of AdS space for early times after the collision. Via the gauge-gravity duality, this gives some insights on bulk dynamics of systems created by high energy scattering in strongly coupled gauge theories. We find that Bjorken boost-invariance is explicitely violated at early times and we obtain an estimate for the thermalization time in this simple system.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0803.3226,
  title  = {On the collision of two shock waves in AdS5},
  author = {Daniel Grumiller and Paul Romatschke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0803.3226},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

15 pages, 1 figure; v2: clarifications on boost-invariance and appendix added; v3: minor modifications, references added, matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:23:36.505Z