How Glasma evolves to Quark-Gluon Plasma: from turbulent attractor to perfect fluid

by Dr Raju Venugopalan (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Tuesday 11 Dec 2018, 16:15 → 17:15 Europe/Berlin

MPI Meeting rooms

Collisions of ultra relativistic heavy nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the US and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe create ephemeral droplets of Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), the hottest matter on earth, with temperatures up to 5 trillion Kelvin. Experiments at RHIC and the LHC provide strong evidence that the QGP flows briefly as a nearly perfect fluid, with very little resistance to its motion, on time scales shorter than 10^{-23} seconds. We outline an ab initio description of how the highly non equilibrium over occupied ``Glasma" matter formed immediately after the collision scrambles information rapidly and flows to a turbulent non-thermal attractor before thermalizing to form the QGP. The hottest matter produced on earth may share a remarkable universality with the coldest matter produced! Simulations of cold atomic gases prepared with the same boundary conditions also flow to a non-thermal attractor with identical universal exponents in a broad inertial range. We speculate on the implications of this universality for infrared dynamics in the QGP and the possibility of uncovering it by event engineering collisions of small systems.