Asymmetric shockwave collisions in AdS5

Abstract

Abstract Collisions of asymmetric planar shocks in maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory are studied via their dual gravitational formulation in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetime. The post-collision hydrodynamic flow is found to be very well described by appropriate means of the results of symmetric shock collisions. This study extends, to asymmetric collisions, previous work of Chesler, Kilbertus, and van der Schee examining the special case of symmetric collisions [1]. Given the universal description of hydrodynamic flow produced by asymmetric planar collisions one can model, quantitatively, non-planar, non-central collisions of highly Lorentz contracted projectiles without the need for computing, holographically, collisions of finite size projectiles with very large aspect ratios. This paper also contains a pedagogical description of the computational methods and software used to compute shockwave collisions using pseudo-spectral methods, supplementing the earlier overview of Chesler and Yaffe [2].