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Updated: May 3, 2026

Characterization of Thermal Transport in One-dimensional Solid Materials
Published on: January 26, 2014
Inhomogeneous thermalization in strongly coupled field theories
V Balasubramanian1, A Bernamonti2, J de Boer3
1David Rittenhouse Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA and Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, École Normale Supérieure, 75005 Paris, France.
Abstract:
To describe theoretically the creation and evolution of the quark-gluon plasma, one typically employs three ingredients: a model for the initial state, nonhydrodynamic early time evolution, and hydrodynamics. In this Letter we study the nonhydrodynamic early time evolution using the AdS/CFT correspondence in the presence of inhomogeneities. We find that the AdS description of the early time evolution is well matched by free streaming. Near the end of the early time interval where our analytic computations are reliable, the stress tensor agrees with the second order hydrodynamic stress tensor computed from the local energy density and fluid velocity. Our techniques may also be useful for the study of far-from-equilibrium strongly coupled systems in other areas of physics.
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