Shearing Black Holes and Scans of the Quark Matter Phase Diagram

Understand

Future facilities such as FAIR and NICA are expected to produce collisions of heavy ions generating quark-gluon plasmas with large values of the quark chemical potential; peripheral collisions in such experiments will also lead to large values of the angular momentum density, associated with the internal shearing motion of the plasma.

• It is well known that shearing motions in fluids can lead to instabilities which cause a transition from laminar to turbulent flow, and such instabilities in the QGP have recently attracted some attention.
• We set up a holographic model of this situation by constructing a gravitational dual system exhibiting an instability which is indeed triggered by shearing angular momentum in the bulk.
• We show that holography indicates that the transition to an unstable fluid happens more quickly as one scans across the quark matter phase diagram towards large values of the chemical potential.