Theory HEP Seminar

Dynamics of heavy-ion collisions and thermalization of weakly-coupled non-abelian plasmas

Sören Schlichting

Universität Heidelberg

The question how thermalization is achieved in relativistic heavy ion collision provides one of the biggest theoretical challenges in our current understanding of the experiments performed at RHIC and the LHC. In this talk we will address the problem of thermalization at weak coupling in two different ways: In the first part of this talk I will discuss recent developments in the color-glass condensate framework, which is designed to provide an ab-initio description of high-energy nucleus-nucleus collision. I will discuss the evolution of the ‘Glasma’ created immediately after the collision of heavy nuclei and describe the different dynamical stages of the system which arise in this context. In the second part of this talk I will address the problem of thermalization of weakly coupled non-abelian plasmas in a more general way and study the thermalization of a class of systems which share important features with the one created in heavy-ion collisions. I will show that, in this case, thermalization proceeds via a turbulent cascade, which is very similar to observations in cosmology. In both cases numerical and analytical considerations will be presented.