Phenomenological implications of asymmetric $AdS_5$ shockwave collision studies for heavy ion physics

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This paper discusses possible phenomenological implications for p+A and A+A collisions of the results of recent numerical AdS/CFT calculations examining asymmetric collisions of planar shocks.

• In view of the extreme Lorentz contraction, we model highly relativistic heavy ion collisions (HICs) as a superposition of collisions between many near-independent transverse "pixels" with differing incident longitudinal momenta.
• It was found that also for asymmetric collisions the hydrodynamization time is in good approximation a proper time, just like for symmetric collisions, depending on the geometric mean of the longitudinally integrated energy densities of the incident projectiles.
• For realistic collisions with fluctuations in the initial energy densities, these results imply a substantial increase in the hydrodynamization time for highly asymmetric pixels.