Abstract

Co-authors: Jorge Casalderrey-Solana (Universitat de Barcelona), Michal Heller (University of Amsterdam), David Mateos (Universitat de Barcelona), Paul Romatschke (University of Colorado), Scott Pratt (University of Michigan)

Numerically simulating colliding planar gravitational shock waves in AdS gives rise to rich and interesting dynamics. Wide shocks come to a full stop and expand hydrodynamically, as was found in [1]. High energy collisions (corresponding to thin shocks) pass through each other, after which a plasma forms in the middle, quite akin to heavy-ion collisions. After an initial stage of far-from-equilibrium evolution the energy density and pressures become positive and are governed by hydrodynamics within a proper time 1/T, with T the local temperature at that time.

In the end I will comment on recent results where we were able to perform a somewhat similar simulation for central collisions and matched this with recent hydrodynamic and hadronic cascade codes, which enables an interesting comparison with transverse spectra for light particles.

[1] P.M. Chesler, L.G. Yaffe, (PRL 2011) [2] J. Casalderrey-Solana, M.P. Heller, D. Mateos, W. van der Schee, 1305.4919 [3] W. van der Schee, P. Romatschke, S. Pratt (to appear)