Collisions with Black Holes and Deconfined Plasmas

TL;DR

The paper investigates dynamic, high-energy interactions with deconfined plasmas using the gravity/gauge duality, focusing on horizon-arm nucleation as a universal non-equilibrium response. By employing a near-horizon Rindler description and the Aichelburg-Sexl metric, the authors derive the arm's shape, reach, and the threshold energy required for nucleation, identifying key parameters like $b_*$ and $L_{BH\ arm}$. They interpret horizon arms as virtual plasma-arms in the gauge theory and as localized heating bubbles that can melt mesons when flavor branes are included, providing scaling relations for bubble size and collapse time. The results suggest universal behavior at large $N_c$ and large $\lambda$ and offer potential experimental tests in QCD plasmas, while outlining directions for more model-specific studies and numerical simulations.

Abstract

We use AdS/CFT to investigate i) high energy collisions with balls of deconfined plasma surrounded by a confining phase and ii) the rapid localized heating of a deconfined plasma. Both of these processes are dual to collisions with black holes, where they result in the nucleation of a new "arm" of the horizon reaching out in the direction of the incident object. We study the resulting non-equilibrium dynamics in a universal limit of the gravitational physics which may indicate universal behavior of deconfined plasmas at large N_c. Process (i) produces "virtual" arms of the plasma ball, while process (ii) can nucleate surprisingly large bubbles of a higher temperature phase.