Collisions with Black Holes and Deconfined Plasmas

TL;DR

This paper uses AdS/CFT correspondence to study high-energy collisions with deconfined plasmas and localized heating, revealing universal non-equilibrium behaviors and horizon dynamics analogous to black hole interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a dual gravitational framework to analyze plasma collisions and heating, uncovering universal horizon features and phase bubble nucleation in strongly coupled plasmas.

Findings

Formation of 'arms' of the horizon during collisions

Nucleation of large bubbles of higher temperature phase

Universal behavior of deconfined plasmas at large N_c

Abstract

We use AdS/CFT to investigate i) high energy collisions with balls of deconfined plasma surrounded by a confining phase and ii) the rapid localized heating of a deconfined plasma. Both of these processes are dual to collisions with black holes, where they result in the nucleation of a new "arm" of the horizon reaching out in the direction of the incident object. We study the resulting non-equilibrium dynamics in a universal limit of the gravitational physics which may indicate universal behavior of deconfined plasmas at large N_c. Process (i) produces "virtual" arms of the plasma ball, while process (ii) can nucleate surprisingly large bubbles of a higher temperature phase.