Universal behaviour, transients and attractors in supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma

Understand

Numerical simulations of expanding plasma based on the AdS/CFT correspondence as well as kinetic theory and hydrodynamic models strongly suggest that some observables exhibit universal behaviour even when the system is not close to local equilibrium.

• This leading behaviour is expected to be corrected by transient, exponentially decaying contributions which carry information about the initial state.
• Focusing on late times, when the system is already in the hydrodynamic regime, we analyse numerical solutions describing expanding plasma of strongly coupled N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and identify these transient effects, matching them in a quantitative way to leading trans-series corrections corresponding to least-damped quasinormal modes of AdS black branes.
• In the process we offer additional evidence supporting the recent identification of the Borel sum of the hydrodynamic gradient expansion with the far-from-equilibrium attractor in this system.