Toward Thermalization in Heavy Ion Collisions at Strong Coupling

Abstract

We find the trapped surface for a collision of two sourceless shock waves in AdS$_5$ and conclude that such collisions always lead to a creation of a black hole in the bulk. Due to holographic correspondence, in the boundary gauge theory this result proves that a thermalized medium (quark-gluon plasma) is produced in heavy ion collisions at strong coupling (albeit in ${\cal N} =4$ super-Yang-Mills theory). We present new evidence supporting the analytic estimate for the time of thermalization that exists in the literature and find that thermalization time is parametrically much shorter than the time of shock wave stopping, indicating that our result may be relevant for description of heavy ion collision experiments.

23 pages, 2 figures; v2: typos corrected, references added, version accepted for publication in JHEP