KdV solitons in a cold quark gluon plasma

TL;DR

This paper derives a KdV equation describing soliton propagation in a cold quark-gluon plasma using a new equation of state that includes perturbative and non-perturbative effects, with potential implications for heavy ion physics and astrophysics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel equation of state for the QGP enabling the derivation of a KdV equation for solitons in a cold QGP, improving upon the simple MIT bag model.

Findings

Derivation of a KdV equation for cold QGP using the new EOS.

Identification of conditions under which solitons can propagate in QGP.

Potential implications for understanding perturbations in heavy ion collisions and astrophysical phenomena.

Abstract

The relativistic heavy ion program developed at RHIC and now at LHC motivated a deeper study of the properties of the quark gluon plasma (QGP) and, in particular, the study of perturbations in this kind of plasma. We are interested on the time evolution of perturbations in the baryon and energy densities. If a localized pulse in baryon density could propagate throughout the QGP for long distances preserving its shape and without loosing localization, this could have interesting consequences for relativistic heavy ion physics and for astrophysics. A mathematical way to proove that this can happen is to derive (under certain conditions) from the hydrodynamical equations of the QGP a Korteveg-de Vries (KdV) equation. The solution of this equation describes the propagation of a KdV soliton. The derivation of the KdV equation depends crucially on the equation of state (EOS) of the QGP. The use of the simple MIT bag model EOS does not lead to KdV solitons. Recently we have developed an EOS for the QGP which includes both perturbative and non-perturbative corrections to the MIT one and is still simple enough to allow for analitycal manipulations. With this EOS we were able to derive a KdV equation for the cold QGP.