Role of nonlocal probes of thermalization for a strongly interacting non-Abelian plasma

Understand

We use a holographic method to investigate thermalization of a boost-invariant strongly interacting non-Abelian plasma.

• Boundary sourcing, a distorsion of the boundary metric, is employed to drive the system far from equilibrium.
• Thermalization is analyzed through nonlocal probes: the equal-time two-point correlation function of large conformal dimension operators in the boundary theory, and Wilson loops of different shapes.
• We study the dependence of the thermalization time on the size of the probes, and compare the results to the ones obtained using local observables: the onset of thermalization is first observed at short distances.