Bjorken Flow of the quark-gluon plasma and Gauge/Gravity Correspondence

The contribution presents a brief summary of the Gauge/Gravity approach to the study of hydrodynamic flow of the quark-gluon plasma formed in heavy-ion collisions, in a boost-invariant setting (Bjorken flow). Considering the ideal case of a supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory for which the AdS/CFT correspondence gives a precise form of the Gauge/Gravity duality, the properties of the strongly coupled expanding plasma are put in one-to-one correspondence with the metric of a 5-dimensional black hole with the horizon moving away in the 5th dimension and its deformations consistent with the relevant Einstein equations. Several recently studied aspects of this framework are recalled and put in perspective. New results in collaboration with G.Beuf and M.Heller on the early time expansion towards the hydrodynamical regime are provided giving a new insight on the far-from-equilibrium behavior of the fluid at strong coupling and the thermalization and isotropization problems.
Comment: 4 pages,1 figure, Proceedings of the EPS 2009 conference, Cracow, July 2009