Thermalization in QCD: theoretical approaches, phenomenological applications, and interdisciplinary connections

Heavy-ion collisions at BNL's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) and CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 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. How the strongly correlated quark-gluon matter forms in a heavy-ion collision, its properties off-equilibrium, and the thermalization process in the plasma, are outstanding problems in QCD. We review here the theoretical progress in this field in weak coupling QCD effective field theories and in strong coupling holographic approaches based on gauge-gravity duality. We outline the interdisciplinary connections of different stages of the thermalization process to non-equilibrium dynamics in other systems across energy scales ranging from inflationary cosmology, to strong field QED, to ultracold atomic gases, with emphasis on the universal dynamics of non-thermal and of hydrodynamic attractors. We survey measurements in heavy-ion collisions that are sensitive to the early non-equilibrium stages of the collision and discuss the potential for future measurements. We summarize the current state-of-the art in thermalization studies and identify promising avenues for further progress

Global fluid fits to identified particle transverse momentum spectra from heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider

Transverse momentum spectra of identified particles produced in heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider are described with relativistic fluid dynamics. We perform a systematic comparison of experimental data for pions, kaons and protons up to a transverse momentum of 3 GeV/c with calculations using the FluiduM code package to solve the evolution equations of fluid dynamics, the TrENTo model to describe the initial state and the FastReso code to take resonance decays into account. Using data in five centrality classes at the center-of-mass collision energy per nucleon pair $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV, we determine systematically the most likely parameters of our theoretical model including the shear and bulk viscosity to entropy ratios, the initialization time, initial density and freeze-out temperature through a global search and quantify their posterior probability. This is facilitated by the very efficient numerical implementation of FluiduM and FastReso. Based on the most likely model parameters we present predictions for the transverse momentum spectra of multi-strange hadrons as well as identified particle spectra from Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV