Shocks in Quark-Gluon Plasmas

Understand

Hydrodynamics is known to describe matter created in high energy heavy ion collisions well.

• Large deposition of energy by passing jets should create not only the sound waves, already discussed in literature, but also the shocks waves of finite amplitude.
• This paper is an introduction to relativistic shocks, which go through elementary energy and momentum continuity argument, to weak shocks treated in Navier-Stokes approximation, to out-of-equilibrium setting of AdS/CFT.
• While we have not yet found numerical solution to corresponding Einstein equations, we have found a variational approximation to the sum of their squares.