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【Abstract】

Heavy-ion collisions at BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider provide strong evidence for the formation of a quark-gluon plasma. Effective weak-coupling QCD descriptions and strong-coupling holographic approaches support the rapid thermalization picture in large collision systems. The outstanding question in QCD is whether the hydrodynamically-flowing quark-gluon matter forms in even smaller collision systems. On the opposite end of the energy scale, the emerging collectivity in strongly-correlated few-body systems can also be studied in table-top experiments with ultracold atomic gases. In this talk, I will review the state of the art of QCD thermalization studies and identify promising connections with cold-atom experiments.