Collisions with Black Holes and Deconfined Plasmas

Abstract

We use AdS/CFT to investigate i) high energy collisions with balls of deconfined plasma surrounded by a confining phase and ii) the rapid localized heating of a deconfined plasma. Both of these processes are dual to collisions with black holes, where they result in the nucleation of a new "arm" of the horizon reaching out in the direction of the incident object. We study the resulting non-equilibrium dynamics in a universal limit of the gravitational physics which may indicate universal behavior of deconfined plasmas at large N_c. Process (i) produces "virtual" arms of the plasma ball, while process (ii) can nucleate surprisingly large bubbles of a higher temperature phase.

25 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• The RHIC fireball as a dual black hole

Cited by in corpus (2)

• The high-energy collision of two black holes
• Entropy production in collisions of gravitational shock waves and of heavy ions