Shock Wave Collisions and Thermalization in AdS_5

Understand

We study heavy ion collisions at strong 't Hooft coupling using AdS/CFT correspondence.

• According to the AdS/CFT dictionary heavy ion collisions correspond to gravitational shock wave collisions in AdS_5.
• We construct the metric in the forward light cone after the collision perturbatively through expansion of Einstein equations in graviton exchanges.
• We obtain an analytic expression for the metric including all-order graviton exchanges with one shock wave, while keeping the exchanges with another shock wave at the lowest order.