Related papers: The Cosmological Heavy Ion Collider: Fast Thermali…
Heavy-ion collisions at BNL's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and CERN's Large Hadron Collider provide strong evidence for the formation of a quark-gluon plasma, with temperatures extracted from relativistic viscous hydrodynamic simulations…
High-energy heavy-ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study the properties of the hot and dense strongly-interacting system composed of deconfined quarks and gluons -- the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) -- in laboratory conditions. The…
We describe the energy distribution of hard gluons travelling through a dense quark-gluon plasma whose temperature increases linearly with time, within a probabilistic perturbative approach. The results were applied to the thermalization…
I review our current understanding of the processes driving the thermalization and isotropization of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) created in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions (URHICs). I begin by discussing the phenomenological…
The onset of thermalization in heavy ion collisions in the weak coupling framework can be viewed as a transition from the initial state Color Glass Condensate dynamics, characterized by the energy density scaling like $\epsilon \sim 1/\tau$…
The thermalization of quark gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions is a crucial theoretical question in understanding the onset of hydrodynamics, and in a broad sense, a key step to the exploration of thermalization in…
Hydrodynamical analysis of experimental data of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions seems to indicate that the hot QCD matter created in the collisions thermalizes very quickly. Theoretically, we have no idea why this should be true. In…
We initiate the study of equilibration rates of strongly coupled quark-gluon plasmas in the absence of conformal symmetry. We primarily consider a supersymmetric mass deformation within ${\cal N}=2^{*}$ gauge theory and use holography to…
We reexamine the scenario of homogeneous nucleation of the quark-gluon plasma produced in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. A generalization of the standard nucleation theory to rapidly expanding system is proposed. The nucleation…
Hydrodynamical modeling of heavy ion collisions at RHIC suggests that the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) "thermalizes" in a remarkably short time scale, about 0.6 fm/c. We argue that this should be viewed as indicating fast isotropization, but…
Collisions between heavy atomic nuclei at ultra-relativistic energies are carried out at particle colliders to produce the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter where quarks and gluons are not confined into hadrons, and colour degrees of…
We study thermalization of the early Universe when the inflaton can decay into the Standard Model (SM) quarks and gluons, using QCD arguments. We describe the possible formation of the thermal plasma of soft gluons and quarks well before…
Ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at the laboratory provide a unique chance to study quantum chromodynamics (QCD) under extreme temperature (${\approx}150\,\mathrm{MeV}$) and density (${\approx}1\,\mathrm{GeV}/\mathrm{fm}^3$)…
We discuss the onset of the thermalization process in high-energy heavy-ion collisions from a weak coupling perspective, using classical-statistical real-time lattice simulations as a first principles tool to study the pre-equilibrium…
We describe some of the recent progress in the calculation of thermodynamic quantities in QCD at high temperatures and densities by weak-coupling techniques and extrapolation to realistic coupling strength. We argue that a (mostly) weakly…
At asymptotically high energies, thermalization in heavy ion collisions can be described via weak-coupling QCD. We present a complete treatment of how thermalization proceeds, at the parametric weak-coupling level. We show that plasma…
When hot quark gluon plasma expands and cools down after an heavy ion collision, charge conservation leads to non-trivial correlations between the charge densities at different rapidities. If these correlations can be measured, they will…
We present an introductory review of the early time dynamics of high-energy heavy-ion collisions and the kinetics of high temperature QCD. The equilibration mechanisms in the quark-gluon plasma uniquely reflect the non-abelian and…
We investigate the thermalization and the chemical equilibration of a parton plasma created from Au+Au collision at LHC and RHIC energies starting from the early moment when the particle momentum distributions in the central region become…
We find the trapped surface for a collision of two sourceless shock waves in AdS$_5$ and conclude that such collisions always lead to a creation of a black hole in the bulk. Due to holographic correspondence, in the boundary gauge theory…