Complexified boost invariance and holographic heavy ion collisions

Understand

At strong coupling holographic studies have shown that heavy ion collisions do not obey normal boost invariance.

• Here we study a modified boost invariance through a complex shift in time, and show that this leads to surprisingly good agreement with numerical holographic computations.
• When including perturbations the agreement becomes even better, both in the hydrodynamic and the far-from-equilibrium regime.
• One of the main advantages is an analytic formulation of the stress-energy tensor of the longitudinal dynamics of holographic heavy ion collisions.