Holography for Heavy Ions Collisions at LHC and NICA

TL;DR

This paper explores how holographic models, especially anisotropic Lifshitz-type backgrounds, can describe quark-gluon plasma formation, phase transitions, and photon production in heavy ion collisions at LHC and NICA energies.

Contribution

It introduces a Lifshitz-type holographic model with non-zero chemical potential to analyze QGP characteristics and phase transitions relevant for LHC and NICA experiments.

Findings

Holographic model describes QGP formation and characteristics.

Phase transition line depends on quark pair orientation.

Estimate of photon production in holographic setup.

Abstract

This is a contribution for the Proceedings of 5th International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics (ICNFP 2016), held at Crete, 6-14 July 2016. Our goal is to obtain phenomenologically reliable insights for the physics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) from the holography. I briefly review how in the holographic setup one can describe the QGP formation in heavy ion collisions and how to get quantitatively the main characteristics of the QGP formation -- the total multiplicity and the thermalization time. To fit the experimental form of dependence of total multiplicity on energy, obtained at LHC, we have to deal with a special anisotropic holographic model, related with the Lifshitz-type background. Our conjecture is that this Lifshitz-type background with non-zero chemical potential can be used to describe future data expected from NICA. In particular, we present the results of calculations of the holographic confinement/deconfinement phase transition in the $(\mu,T)$ (chemical potential, temperature) plane in this anisotropic background and show the dependence of the transition line on the orientation of the quark pair. This dependence leads to a non-sharp character of physical confinement/deconfinement phase in the $(\mu,T)$-plane. We use the bottom-up soft wall approach incorporating quark confinement deforming factor and vector field providing the non-zero chemical potential. In this model we also estimate the holographic photon production.