Coupling Constant Corrections in a Holographic Model of Heavy Ion Collisions with Nonzero Baryon Number Density

Understand

Sufficiently energetic collisions of heavy ions result in the formation of a droplet of a strongly coupled liquid state of QCD matter known as quark-gluon plasma.

• By using gauge-gravity duality (holography), a model of a rapidly hydrodynamizing and thermalizing process like this can be constructed by colliding sheets of energy density moving at the speed of light and tracking the subsequent evolution.
• In this work, we consider the dual gravitational description of such collisions in the most general bulk theory with a four-derivative gravitational action containing a dynamical metric and a gauge field in five dimensions.
• Introducing the bulk gauge field enables the analysis of collisions of sheets which carry nonzero "baryon" number density in addition to energy density.