Cavitation in strongly coupled field theories

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Paul Romatschke
• Subject Area: Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
• Term: Funded in 2011
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 192566851

• Final Report Year: 2014

Final Report Abstract

In this project, we investigated the effect from cavitation in heavy-ion collisions by evaluating the critical value of bulk viscosity necessary to drive the local effective pressure negative. Since the fluid dynamics background used in this study was obtained from a realistic numerical solutions applicable to heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), our findings indicated that the phenomenon of cavitation may be intricably linked with the confinement transition in QCD. Since experimental evidence suggests that the confinement transition does not occur at high temperature in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC, this implies the absence of cavitation in heavy-ion collisions, and thus a maximally allowed value of the bulk viscosity over entropy density ratio. Using this criterion, our work thus naturally leads to a maximum value for the ratio of bulk viscosity over entropy density as a function of temperature, which may have phenomenological relevance for high energy nuclear collisions such as those at RHIC. No continuation of this work is planned in connection with DFG. However, there continues to be a strong science basis for further studies of cavitation in strongly coupled field theories.

Publications

• JHEP 1412 (2014) 054
  M. Habich and P. Romatschke