Triangle Nuclear Theory Colloquium - Numerical holography for heavy ion physics and hydrodynamics

The gauge gravity correspondence allows us to compute far from equilibrium dynamics of strongly coupled field theories. Einstein gravity in five dimensional, asymptotic Anti-de Sitter space is mapped to to N=4 Super Yang-Mills theory (SYM), which can be used to approximate QCD at high temperatures with limitations that will be discussed. In the limit of small gradients this duality becomes an equivalence between black hole dynamics and fluids with small viscosity. We apply holography to compute the collision of energy density distributions in SYM modeling boosted nuclei during heavy-ion collisions to address questions concerning thermalization, hydrodynamization, and the vorticity of the forming quark-gluon plasma. Moreover, we use the fluid gravity correspondence to geometrize turbulent flow and translate statistical properties of turbulent fluids into geometric observables with the goal of explaining anomalous scaling exponents for higher moments of fluid velocity correlators via gravity. For this we compute the fluid phase of conformal matter driven by a randomly fluctuating gravitational potential, numerically solving the evolution of a black hole in Anti-de Sitter space with a fluctuating, stochastic boundary metric.