Conveners
Non-equilibrium dynamics of the QGP
- Michael Strickland (Kent State University)
Description
co-host: Michael Strickland
We establish the existence of a far-from-equilibrium attractor in weakly-coupled gauge theory undergoing one-dimensional Bjorken expansion. We demonstrate that the resulting far-from-equilibrium evolution is insensitive to certain features of the initial condition, including both the initial momentum-space anisotropy and initial occupancy. We find that this insensitivity extends beyond the...
The equilibration and hydrodynamization of pre-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions are of interest. We established a numerical implementation of the QCD effective kinetic theory based on Arnold, Moore, Yaffe framework at leading order, including both gluon and light quark/antiquark degrees of freedom. A universal hydrodynamic attractor is present even at...
Motivated by recent interest in collectivity in small systems, we calculate harmonic flow response to initial geometry deformations within weakly coupled QCD kinetic theory using the first correction to the free-streaming background. We derive a parametric scaling formula that relates hadronic flow in systems of different sizes and different generic initial gluon distributions. We comment on...
Motivated by the early-time dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, we study spectral excitations of overoccupied gauge theories far from equilibrium using classical-statistical lattice simulations. In 3+1 dimensions we find that the spectral function exhibits quasiparticle excitations at all momenta that are mostly consistent with perturbative hard-thermal loop...
Penetrating probes in heavy-ion collisions, like jets and photons, are sensitive to the transport coefficients of the produced quark-gluon plasma. Quantifying this sensitivity requires a detailed understanding of photon emission and jet-medium interaction in a non-equilibrium plasma during the hydrodynamic stages of heavy-ion collisions. Up to now, such an understanding has been hindered by...
