Cavitation in holographic sQGP

TL;DR

This paper investigates cavitation phenomena in a holographic model of a nonconformal quark-gluon plasma, finding that cavitation does not occur before phase transition, supported by semi-analytic reasoning.

Contribution

It demonstrates that cavitation is absent in the N=2^* holographic plasma model prior to phase transition, extending understanding of fluid dynamics in holographic QCD models.

Findings

Cavitation does not occur before phase transition in the model

Semi-analytic explanation supports the numerical results

The model's transport coefficients influence cavitation behavior

Abstract

We study the possibility of cavitation in the nonconformal N=2^* SU(N) theory which is a mass deformation of N=4 SU(N) Yang-Mills theory. The second order transport coefficients are known from the numerical work using AdS/CFT by Buchel and collaborators. Using these and the approach of Rajagopal and Tripuraneni, we investigate the flow equations in a 1+1 dimensional boost invariant set up. We find that the string theory model does not exhibit cavitation before phase transition is reached. We give a semi-analytic explanation of this finding.