Holographic Collisions across a Phase Transition

Understand

We use holography to analyse relativistic collisions in a one-parameter family of strongly coupled gauge theories with thermal phase transitions.

• For a critical value of the parameter the transition is second order, for subcritical values it is first order, and for super-critical values it is a smooth crossover.
• We extract the gauge theory stress tensor from collisions of gravitational shock waves on the dual geometries.
• Regardless of the nature of the transition, for values of the parameter close to the critical value almost all the energy of the projectiles is deposited into a long-lived, quasi-static blob of energy at mid-rapidity.