Abstract

The motivation of this seminar is to understand the thermalisation of heavy ion collisions using AdS/CFT. For this I will present two models, the first being a somewhat simplistic boost-invariant radially expanding approach. The simplicity, however, allowed us to solve the model all the way till the final particle spectra, with an interesting comparison with experimental data. On the more theoretical side we simulated colliding planar gravitational shock waves. This gives rise to rich and interesting dynamics; wide shocks come to a full stop and expand hydrodynamically, as was previously found by Chesler and Yaffe. High energy collisions (corresponding to thin shocks) pass through each other, after which a plasma forms in the middle, within a proper time 1/T, with T the local temperature at that time. In the end I will discuss recent results where we studied the influence of microscopic structure in the longitudinal direction. This has implications for both fluctuations in nucleus-nucleus collisions, and for recent proton-lead collisions at at LHC .