2006/06/30 by Romuald A. Janik, Robi Peschanski · 15 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #hep-ph #hep-th #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.74.046007
published as Phys.Rev.D74:046007,2006 · 11 pages, no figures; v2: misprints corrected, results unchanged; v3: reference added
arxiv created 2006/07/11 · openalex publication_date 2006/08/24 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We derive the equation for the quasinormal modes corresponding to the scalar excitation of a black hole moving away in the fifth dimension. This geometry is the AdS/CFT dual of a boost-invariant expanding perfect fluid in N=4 SUSY Yang-Mills theory at large proper-time. On the gauge-theory side, the dominant solution of the equation describes the decay back to equilibrium of a scalar excitation of the perfect fluid. Its characteristic proper-time can be interpreted as a thermalization time of the perfect fluid, which is a universal (and numerically small) constant in units of the unique scale of the problem. This may provide a new insight on the short thermalization-time puzzle encountered in heavy-ion collision phenomenology. A nontrivial scaling behavior in proper-time is obtained which can be interpreted in terms of a slowly varying adiabatic approximation.