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Abstract |
We use holography to mimic heavy ion collisions and obtain new qualitative insights possibly relevant for
QCD. Our studies are motivated by the extensive experimental efforts devoted to the search of the
conjectured critical point in the QCD phase diagram. Holographically, we perform collisions in strongly-
coupled gauge theories with thermal phase transitions. We find that near a second order phase transition
almost all the energy of the projectiles is deposited into a long-lived, quasi-static blob of energy. Moreover,
hydrodynamics describes this blob only if we consider a formulation different from the Muller-Israel-Stewart
formulation that is almost universally used in the numerical codes describing the quark-gluon plasma formed
at RHIC and LHC.
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