At weak coupling and high temperatures, a successful first principle dynamical description of the QGP medium is given by QCD effective kinetic theory (EKT). The leading order elastic scatterings and medium induced colinear radiation contain the essential microscopic physics necessary to describe the equilibration of non-abelian plasma—the so called “bottom up” thermalization scenario (see figure above). Therefore EKT links the early time particle production by strong color fields in the colliding nuclei to the late time hydrodynamic evolution of QGP fluid (Berges et al., 2021). Detailed numerical simulations of EKT provided quantitative understanding of the hydrodynamization, pre-scaling and chemical equilibration phenomena in heavy ion collisions (Keegan et al., 2016; Kurkela et al., 2019; Kurkela et al., 2019; Kurkela & Mazeliauskas, 2019; Kurkela & Mazeliauskas, 2019; Mazeliauskas & Berges, 2019; Giacalone et al., 2019; Mazeliauskas & Berges, 2019; Heller et al., 2024). While so far EKT studies have been limited to large systems, it is perfectly suited to study the system size dependence of collective effects. Therefore, my group is extending EKT computations to study the jet quenching and collective flow phenomena at different system sizes (Kurkela et al., 2021; Zhou et al., 2024). Our goal is to predict the rich set of kinematic, chemical, and electromagnetic signals of collective phenomena observed at the LHC.
@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},}
@article{Zhou:2024ysb,author={Zhou, Fabian and Brewer, Jasmine and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas},title={{Minijet quenching in non-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma}},archiveprefix={arXiv},primaryclass={hep-ph},doi={10.1007/JHEP06(2024)214},journal={JHEP},volume={06},pages={214},year={2024},}
2021
Rev. Mod. Phys.
QCD thermalization: Ab initio approaches and interdisciplinary connections
Jürgen Berges, Michal P. Heller, Aleksas Mazeliauskas, and 1 more author
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},}
@article{Kurkela:2021ctp,author={Kurkela, Aleksi and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and T\"ornkvist, Robin},title={{Collective flow in single-hit QCD kinetic theory}},archiveprefix={arXiv},primaryclass={hep-ph},doi={10.1007/JHEP11(2021)216},journal={JHEP},volume={11},pages={216},year={2021}}
@article{Kurkela:2018vqr,author={Kurkela, Aleksi and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Paquet, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois and Schlichting, S\"oren and Teaney, Derek},title={{Effective kinetic description of event-by-event pre-equilibrium dynamics in high-energy heavy-ion collisions}},archiveprefix={arXiv},primaryclass={hep-ph},doi={10.1103/PhysRevC.99.034910},journal={Phys. Rev. C},volume={99},number={3},pages={034910},year={2019}}
@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}}
@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}}
@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}}
@article{Keegan:2016cpi,author={Keegan, Liam and Kurkela, Aleksi and Mazeliauskas, Aleksas and Teaney, Derek},title={{Initial conditions for hydrodynamics from weakly coupled pre-equilibrium evolution}},archiveprefix={arXiv},primaryclass={hep-ph},reportnumber={CERN-TH-2016-117},doi={10.1007/JHEP08(2016)171},journal={JHEP},volume={08},pages={171},year={2016}}
