Nuclear Physics Colloquium
Location: ITP
Science Campus Riedberg, Max-von-Laue-Str. 1, room 02.116
Time: Thursday, May 23, 2013, 4:30-5:30pm (plus
10min for discussion)
Contact: hees@fias.uni-frankfurt.de
Turbulent
Thermalization of the QGP
Sören Schlichting
(University Heidelberg)
The past decades of
heavy-ion physics have revealed remarkable properties of the Quark
Gluon Plasma formed in collider experiments at RHIC and the LHC.
One of the most striking observations is the apparent behavior of
the Quark Gluon Plasma as a nearly perfect fluid. However, the
question of how these features emerge ab initio in a heavy-ion
collision, and to what extent a thermalized Quark Gluon Plasma is
achieved is an outstanding problem in theoretical physics. In this
talk I will address the problem of thermalization of the Quark
Gluon Plasma in an idealized weak-coupling approach. We employ
classical-statistical real-time lattice simulations as a
first-principle approach, to demonstrate the existence of a
non-thermal fixed
point in the space-time evolution of the plasma. Most remarkably,
we find that the thermalization process is governed by a universal
attractor, which exhibits the self-similar dynamics characteristic
of wave turbulence, as observed in a large variety of strongly
correlated many-body systems across di fferent energy scales.
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