On the collision of two shock waves in AdS 5

Abstract

We consider two ultrarelativistic shock waves propagating and colliding in five-dimensional Anti-de-Sitter spacetime. By transforming to Rosen coordinates, we are able to find the form of the metric shortly after the collision. Using holographic renormalization, we calculate the energy-momentum tensor on the boundary of AdS space for early times after the collision. Via the gauge-gravity duality, this gives some insights on bulk dynamics of systems created by high energy scattering in strongly coupled gauge theories. We find that Bjorken boost-invariance is explicitely violated at early times and we obtain an estimate for the thermalization time in this simple system.