No Arabic abstract
In heavy-ion collisions, the quark-gluon plasma is produced far from equilibrium. This regime is currently inaccessible by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) computations. We calculate shear transport and entropy far from equilibrium in a holographic model, defining a time-dependent ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density, $eta/s$. Large deviations of up to 60% from its near-equilibrium value, $1/4pi$, are found for realistic situations at the Large Hadron Collider. We predict the far-from-equilibrium time-dependence of $eta/s$ to substantially affect the evolution of the QCD plasma and to impact the extraction of QCD properties from flow coefficients in heavy-ion collision data.
Shear viscosity is a crucial property of QCD matter which determines the collective behavior of the the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. Extending the near-equilibrium, high-precision investigations in theory and experiment, we take into account the fact that, in a collision, the QGP is generated far from equilibrium. We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to study a strongly coupled plasma and find a significant impact on the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density, $eta/s$. In particular, we investigate the initial heating phase and find a decrease reaching down to below 60% followed by an overshoot to 110% of the near-equilibrium value. This finding might be highly relevant for the extraction of transport coefficients from anisotropic flow measurements at RHIC and LHC.
I review the use of the 2PI effective action in nonequilibrium quantum field theory. The approach enables one to find approximation schemes which circumvent long-standing problems of non-thermal or secular (unbounded) late-time evolutions encountered in standard loop or 1/N expansions of the 1PI effective action. It is shown that late-time thermalization can be described from a numerical solution of the three-loop 2PI effective action for a scalar $phi^4$--theory in 1+1 dimensions (with Jurgen Cox, hep-ph/0006160). Quantitative results far from equilibrium beyond the weak coupling expansion can be obtained from the 1/N expansion of the 2PI effective action at next-to-leading order (NLO), calculated for a scalar O(N) symmetric quantum field theory (hep-ph/0105311). Extending recent calculations in classical field theory by Aarts et al. (hep-ph/0007357) and by Blagoev et al. (hep-ph/0106195) to $N>1$ we show that the NLO approximation converges to exact (MC) results already for moderate values of $N$ (with Gert Aarts, hep-ph/0107129). I comment on characteristic time scales in scalar quantum field theory and the applicability of classical field theory for sufficiently high initial occupation numbers.
We study the chiral vortical effect far from equilibrium in a strongly coupled holographic field theory. Rotation is represented as a perturbation via a gravito-magnetic field on top of a five-dimensional charged AdS Vaidya metric. We also introduce a momentum relaxation mechanism by linear scalar field backgrounds and study the CVE dynamics as function of the charges, temperature and momentum relaxation. The far from equilibrium behavior shows that the CVE builds up with a significant delay in time compared to the quasi instantaneous equilibration of the background metric. We also pay special attention to the effects of the gravitational contribution to the axial anomaly in the CVE of the axial current. We develop an analytic estimate of this delay and also compute the quasi-normal modes near equilibrium which determine the late time ring down.
We consider deep inelastic scattering (DIS) on a nucleus described using a density expansion. In leading order, the scattering is dominated by the incoherent scattering on individual nucleons distributed using the Thomas-Fermi approximation. We use the holographic structure functions for DIS scattering on single nucleons to make a non-perturbative estimate of the nuclear structure function in leading order in the density. Our results are compared to the data in the large-x regime.
We compute anomalous transport phenomena sourced by vector and axial magnetic fields in out of equilibrium setups produced by Vaidya background metrics in holography. We use generalized Vaidya metrics that include momentum relaxation induced by massless scalar fields. While the background metric and gauge field show formally instantaneous thermalization the chiral magnetic effect has significantly large equilibration times. We study how the equilibration of the chiral magnetic effect depends on the length of the Vaidya quench and the momentum relaxation parameter. These results shed some light on aspects of the chiral magnetic effect in out of equilibrium situations as the quark gluon plasma produced in heavy ion collisions.