Inhomogeneous holographic thermalization

Understand

The sudden injection of energy in a strongly coupled conformal field theory and its subsequent thermalization can be holographically modeled by a shell falling into anti-de Sitter space and forming a black brane.

• For a homogeneous shell, Bhattacharyya and Minwalla were able to study this process analytically using a weak field approximation.
• Motivated by event-by-event fluctuations in heavy ion collisions, we include inhomogeneities in this model, obtaining analytic results in a long wavelength expansion.
• In the early-time window in which our approximations can be trusted, the resulting evolution matches well with that of a simple free streaming model.