title: Equilibration Rates in a Strongly Coupled Nonconformal Quark-Gluon Plasma.
abstract: We initiate the study of equilibration rates of strongly coupled quark-gluon plasmas in the absence of conformal symmetry. We primarily consider a supersymmetric mass deformation within N=2^{*} gauge theory and use holography to compute quasinormal modes of a variety of scalar operators, as well as the energy-momentum tensor. In each case, the lowest quasinormal frequency, which provides an approximate upper bound on the thermalization time, is proportional to temperature, up to a prefactor with only a mild temperature dependence. We find similar behavior in other holographic plasmas, where the model contains an additional scale beyond the temperature. Hence, our study suggests that the thermalization time is generically set by the temperature, irrespective of any other scales, in strongly coupled gauge theories.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Mathematics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5B7, Canada.|Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada.
authors.forename: Alex
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Buchel
authors.affiliation: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada.
authors.forename: Michal P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Heller
authors.affiliation: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada.
authors.forename: Robert C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Myers