46 research outputs found
Holography in Quark-Gluon Plasma and Neutron Stars
In this thesis, QCD is studied from three different directions, with one
overarching theme: holography. The holographic duality allows certain strongly
coupled QFTs to be described in terms of much simpler classical gravity in one
dimension more. The first direction from which QCD is studied in this thesis is
by examining the effects of an external magnetic field on a particular
holographic model of QCD, yielding interesting qualitative insight. The second
approach examines how, in the same model, one can describe dense baryonic
configurations, providing a new way to study the matter composing neutron
stars. Indeed, the equation of state produced in this way is subsequently used
to compute several neutron star properties which are observable, or will be in
the near future. The last direction contains no holographic computations per
se, but does incorporate several qualitative insights from holography into a
new heavy ion code called Trajectum. This will in the near future be used to
perform a Bayesian analysis, whereby it is hoped that these qualitative
insights from holography can be tested on experimental data, to see how well
the ideas coming from holography match up with experiment.Comment: PhD Thesis, 202 pages, 49 figures,
http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/39729
Holographic QCD in the Veneziano limit at finite Magnetic Field and Chemical Potential
We investigate the phase diagram of QCD-like gauge theories at strong
coupling at finite magnetic field , temperature and baryon chemical
potential using the improved holographic QCD model including the full
backreaction of the quarks in the plasma. In addition to the phase diagram we
study the behavior of the quark condensate as a function of , and
and discuss the fate of (inverse) magnetic catalysis at finite . In
particular we observe that inverse magnetic catalysis exists only for small
values of the baryon chemical potential. The speed of sound in this holographic
quark-gluon plasma exhibits interesting dependence on the thermodynamic
parameters.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
Inverse Anisotropic Catalysis in Holographic QCD
We investigate the effects of anisotropy on the chiral condensate in a
holographic model of QCD with a fully backreacted quark sector at vanishing
chemical potential. The high temperature deconfined phase is a neutral and
anisotropic plasma showing different pressure gradients along different spatial
directions, similar to the state produced in noncentral heavy-ion collisions.
We find that the chiral transition occurs at a lower temperature in the
presence of anisotropy. Equivalently, we find that anisotropy acts
destructively on the chiral condensate near the transition temperature. These
are precisely the same footprints as the "inverse magnetic catalysis" i.e. the
destruction of the condensate with increasing magnetic field observed earlier
on the lattice, in effective field theory models and in holography. Based on
our findings we suggest, in accordance with the conjecture of [1], that the
cause for the inverse magnetic catalysis may be the anisotropy caused by the
presence of the magnetic field instead of the charge dynamics created by it. We
conclude that the weakening of the chiral condensate due to anisotropy is more
general than that due to a magnetic field and we coin the former "inverse
anisotropic catalysis". Finally, we observe that any amount of anisotropy
changes the IR physics substantially: the geometry is up to small corrections, confinement is present only up to a
certain scale, and the particles acquire finite widths.Comment: 41 pages, 11 figure
A generalized hydrodynamizing initial stage for Heavy Ion Collisions
We present an extended Bayesian analysis using Trajectum where the initial
condition can now include binary scaling. For the far-from-equilibrium
evolution before hydrodynamics we introduce an interpolation between free
streaming and a holographically inspired evolution that exhibits fast
hydrodynamization. We find strong evidence that binary scaling is incompatible
with experimental data and find evidence that the holographic
far-from-equilibrium evolution is preferred. We end with a discussion on
several changes and improvements in the Bayesian framework.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures. The Trajectum code can be found at
https://sites.google.com/view/govertnijs/trajectum. Plotting routines can be
found at http://wilkevanderschee.nl/trajectu
Quarkonium transport in strongly coupled plasmas
Suppression of open heavy flavors and quarkonia in heavy-ion collisions is
among the most informative probes of the quark-gluon plasma. Interpreting the
full wealth of data obtained from the collision events requires a precise
understanding of the evolution of heavy quarks and quarkonia as they propagate
through the nearly thermal and strongly coupled plasma. Systematic theoretical
studies of quarkonium time evolution in the QGP in the regime where the
temperature of the QGP is much smaller than the inverse of quarkonium size have
only been carried out in the past few years. Such calculations require the
evaluation of a gauge-invariant correlator of chromoelectric fields dressed
with Wilson lines, which is similar to, but different from, the correlation
used to define the well-known arXiv:hep-ph/0605199 heavy quark diffusion
coefficient. The origin of this difference has been explained in
arXiv:2107.03945, arXiv:2205.04477, arXiv:2306.13127. Here we show the results
of the calculation of the analogous correlator in strongly coupled
SYM using the AdS/CFT correspondence at a finite temperature
arXiv:2304.03298. While it resembles the open heavy quark case, it has some
crucial differences that highlight the relevance of quantum color correlations.
We will also discuss the results for the quarkonium transport coefficients
obtained from this correlator, thereby establishing the first analytic results
at strong coupling in this context. We find that they vanish in the strong
coupling limit for an SYM plasma with a large number of colors.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the 11th
International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High Energy
Nuclear Collisions (Hard Probes 2023
Unified weak and strong coupling framework for nuclear matter and neutron stars
Ab initio methods using weakly interacting nucleons give a good description of condensed nuclear matter up to densities comparable to the nuclear saturation density. At higher densities strong interactions between overlapping nucleons become important; we propose that the interactions will continuously switch over to follow a holographic model in this region. In order to implement this, we construct hybrid equations of state (EOSs) where various models are used for low-density nuclear matter, and the holographic V-QCD model is used for nonperturbative high-density nuclear matter as well as for quark matter. We carefully examine all existing constraints from astrophysics of compact stars and discuss their implications for the hybrid EOSs. Thanks to the stiffness of the V-QCD EOS for nuclear matter, we obtain a large family of viable hybrid EOSs passing the constraints. We find that quark matter cores in neutron stars are unstable due to the strongly first-order deconfinement transition and predict bounds on the tidal deformability as well as on the radius of neutron stars. By relying on universal relations, we also constrain characteristic peak frequencies of gravitational waves produced in neutron star mergers.Peer reviewe
A Bayesian analysis of Heavy Ion Collisions with Trajectum
We introduce a model for heavy ion collisions named Trajectum, which includes
an expanded initial stage with a variable free streaming velocity
and a hydrodynamic stage with three varying second order transport
coefficients. We describe how to obtain a Gaussian Emulator for this
20-parameter model and show results for key observables. This emulator can be
used to obtain Bayesian posterior estimates on the parameters, which we test by
an elaborate closure test as well as a convergence study. Lastly, we employ the
optimal values of the parameters found in [1] to perform a detailed comparison
to experimental data from PbPb and Pb collisions. This includes both
observables that have been used to obtain these values as well as wider
transverse momentum ranges and new observables such as correlations of
event-plane angles.Comment: 28 pages, 29 figures, see also the companion paper "A transverse
momentum differential global analysis of Heavy Ion Collisions
Gravitational waves from holographic neutron star mergers
We present simulations of binary neutron star mergers with equations of state (EoSs) that have input from holography, and analyze the spectral properties of the resulting waveforms. These EoSs consist of a standard nuclear matter EoS at low densities, transitioning to a state-of-the-art holographic EoS with first-order deconfinement phase transition in the otherwise intractable high-density regime. Depending on the transition density, the characteristic frequencies in the spectrum produced from the hybrid EoSs are shifted to significantly lower values. Equal-mass binaries with a total mass of 2.8 M-circle dot reach densities in the quark matter phase in the core of the transient hypermassive neutron star, which then induces an immediate gravitational collapse.Peer reviewe
A transverse momentum differential global analysis of Heavy Ion Collisions
The understanding of heavy ion collisions and its quark-gluon plasma
formation requires a complicated interplay of rich physics in a wealth of
experimental data. In this work we compare for identified particles the
transverse momentum dependence of both the yields and the anisotropic flow
coefficients for both PbPb and Pb collisions. We do this in a global model
fit including a free streaming prehydrodynamic phase with variable velocity
, thereby widening the scope of initial conditions. During the
hydrodynamic phase we vary three second order transport coefficients. The free
streaming velocity has a preference slightly below the speed of light. In this
extended model the bulk viscosity is small and even consistent with zero.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, see also the companion paper "A Bayesian analysis
of Heavy Ion Collisions with Trajectum
Cool baryon and quark matter in holographic QCD
We establish a holographic bottom-up model which covers both the baryonic and quark matter phases in cold and dense QCD. This is obtained by including the baryons using simple approximation schemes in the V-QCD model, which also includes the backreaction of the quark matter to the dynamics of pure Yang-Mills. We examine two approaches for homogeneous baryon matter: baryons as a thin layer of noninteracting matter in the holographic bulk, and baryons with a homogeneous bulk gauge field. We find that the second approach exhibits phenomenologically reasonable features. At zero temperature, the vacuum, baryon, and quark matter phases are separated by strongly first order transitions as the chemical potential varies. The equation of state in the baryonic phase is found to be stiff, i.e., the speed of sound clearly exceeds the value c2 = 1/3 of conformal plasmas at high baryon densities.Peer reviewe