Aleksas Mazeliauskas

Dr. Aleksas Mazeliauskas

Group leader

What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
— Werner Heisenberg

Hello, my name is Aleksas Mazeliauskas. I am a theoretical physicist working on many-body phenomena emerging from interactions of a small number of particles in high-energy hadron collisions and ultracold quantum gases.

Since 2022 I am leading an Emmy Noether Reasearch Group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University. As of 2024, I am a project leader at the Collaborative Research Center ISOQUANT.

My group’s research focuses on the microscopic understanding of the emergent collective phenomena in systems of varying sizes and at varying energy scales. I am especially interested in the question of thermalisation and hydrodynamic behaviour in isolated quantum systems.

Check out my research projects, publications and profiles of my group members. See the news announcements for open positions and my blog for occasional posts about my life as a researcher.

News

Feb 04, 2025	Published my new paper Hydrodynamic attractor in periodically driven ultracold quantum gases in collaboration of Tilman Enss.
Jan 16, 2025	Q’inich Figueroa defended his bachelor thesis: soft pion enhacement due to resonance decays with spectral functions.
Nov 17, 2024	Made the new version of the website public. Note, that it is still under construction. There is a backlog of blog posts to write. :)
Nov 11, 2024	An open postdoc position in my group! Please share with suitable candidates.
Aug 11, 2024	Started redesigning my group website with Jekyll.

Latest posts

Nov 17, 2024	Light ion workshop at CERN
Dec 26, 2023	First year of my Emmy Noether group
Jul 16, 2023	Emmy Noether meeting in Potsdam

Selected publications

Hydrodynamic attractor in periodically driven ultracold quantum gases

Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Tilman Enss

2025

arXiv Cite

@misc{mazeliauskas:2025hyd,
  author = {Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Enss, Tilman},
  title = {{Hydrodynamic attractor in periodically driven ultracold quantum gases}},
  month = jan,
  year = {2025},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cond-mat.quant-gas},
}

No-quenching baseline for energy loss signals in oxygen-oxygen collisions

Jannis Gebhard, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Adam Takacs

2024

arXiv Cite

@article{Gebhard:2024flv,
  author = {Gebhard, Jannis and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Takacs, Adam},
  title = {{No-quenching baseline for energy loss signals in oxygen-oxygen collisions}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  month = oct,
  year = {2024},
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

Prescaling Relaxation to Nonthermal Attractors

Michal P. Heller, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Thimo Preis

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2024

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Heller:2023mah,
  author = {Heller, Michal P. and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Preis, Thimo},
  title = {{Prescaling Relaxation to Nonthermal Attractors}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-th},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.071602},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {132},
  number = {7},
  pages = {071602},
  year = {2024},
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

Medium-Enhanced c\barc Radiation

Maximilian Attems, Jasmine Brewer, Gian Michele Innocenti, and 5 more authors

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2024

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Attems:2022otp,
  author = {Attems, Maximilian and Brewer, Jasmine and Innocenti, Gian Michele and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Park, Sohyun and van der Schee, Wilke and Soyez, Gregory and Wiedemann, Urs Achim},
  title = {{Medium-Enhanced $c\bar{c}$ Radiation}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  reportnumber = {CERN-TH-2022-046},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.212301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {132},
  number = {21},
  pages = {212301},
  year = {2024}
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

Discovering Partonic Rescattering in Light Nucleus Collisions

Alexander Huss, Aleksi Kurkela, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and 3 more authors

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2021

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Huss:2020dwe,
  author = {Huss, Alexander and Kurkela, Aleksi and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Paatelainen, Risto and van der Schee, Wilke and Wiedemann, Urs Achim},
  title = {{Discovering Partonic Rescattering in Light Nucleus Collisions}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  reportnumber = {CERN-TH-2020-126},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.192301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {126},
  number = {19},
  pages = {192301},
  year = {2021},
}

Rev. Mod. Phys.
QCD thermalization: Ab initio approaches and interdisciplinary connections

Jürgen Berges, Michal P. Heller, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and 1 more author

Rev. Mod. Phys., 2021

Abs DOI arXiv Cite

Heavy-ion collisions at BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider provide strong evidence for the formation of a quark-gluon plasma, with temperatures extracted from relativistic viscous hydrodynamic simulations shown to be well above the transition temperature from hadron matter. Outstanding problems in QCD include how the strongly correlated quark-gluon matter forms in a heavy-ion collision, its properties off equilibrium, and the thermalization process in the plasma. The theoretical progress in this field in weak-coupling QCD effective field theories and in strong-coupling holographic approaches based on gauge-gravity duality is reviewed. The interdisciplinary connections of different stages of the thermalization process to nonequilibrium dynamics in other systems across energy scales ranging from inflationary cosmology to strong-field QED to ultracold atomic gases are outlined, with emphasis placed on the universal dynamics of nonthermal and hydrodynamic attractors. Measurements in heavy-ion collisions are surveyed that are sensitive to the early nonequilibrium stages of the collision and the potential for future measurements is discussed. The current state of the art in thermalization studies is summarized and promising avenues for further progress are identified.
@article{Berges:2020fwq, author = {Berges, J\"urgen and Heller, Michal P. and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Venugopalan, Raju}, title = {{QCD thermalization: Ab initio approaches and interdisciplinary connections}}, archiveprefix = {arXiv}, primaryclass = {hep-th}, reportnumber = {CERN-TH-2020-080}, doi = {10.1103/RevModPhys.93.035003}, journal = {Rev. Mod. Phys.}, volume = {93}, number = {3}, pages = {035003}, year = {2021}, }

Phys. Rev. Lett.

Hydrodynamic attractors, initial state energy and particle production in relativistic nuclear collisions

Giuliano Giacalone, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Sören Schlichting

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Giacalone:2019ldn,
  author = {Giacalone, Giuliano and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Schlichting, S\"oren},
  title = {{Hydrodynamic attractors, initial state energy and particle production in relativistic nuclear collisions}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  reportnumber = {INT-PUB-19-036},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.262301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {123},
  number = {26},
  pages = {262301},
  year = {2019}
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

Chemical Equilibration in Hadronic Collisions

Aleksi Kurkela, and Aleksas Mazeliauskas

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Kurkela:2018xxd,
  author = {Kurkela, Aleksi and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas},
  title = {{Chemical Equilibration in Hadronic Collisions}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  reportnumber = {CERN-TH-2018-238},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.142301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {122},
  pages = {142301},
  year = {2019}
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

Prescaling and far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamics in the quark-gluon plasma

Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and Jürgen Berges

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Mazeliauskas:2018yef,
  author = {Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Berges, J\"urgen},
  title = {{Prescaling and far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamics in the quark-gluon plasma}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.122301},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {122},
  number = {12},
  pages = {122301},
  year = {2019}
}

Phys. Rev. Lett.

Matching the Nonequilibrium Initial Stage of Heavy Ion Collisions to Hydrodynamics with QCD Kinetic Theory

Aleksi Kurkela, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, Jean-François Paquet, and 2 more authors

Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019

DOI arXiv Cite

@article{Kurkela:2018wud,
  author = {Kurkela, Aleksi and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Paquet, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois and Schlichting, S\"oren and Teaney, Derek},
  title = {{Matching the Nonequilibrium Initial Stage of Heavy Ion Collisions to Hydrodynamics with QCD Kinetic Theory}},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {hep-ph},
  doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.122302},
  journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
  volume = {122},
  number = {12},
  pages = {122302},
  year = {2019}
}