Ramanujan Auditorium

Classical lumps and their quantum descendants in Quantum Chromodynamics at high energies

Raju Venugopalan

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Nearly all visible matter in the universe is made up of fundamental quarks and gluons, whose interactions are
described by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). At very high energies, the complex many-body dynamics of quarks and glue can be represented by semi-classical metastable lumps representing
very strong chromo-electromagnetic fields; their dynamics is described by the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) effective theory.
We describe some of the remarkable features of this matter; in particular, the collision of two CGC's in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions thermalizes to form a
Quark-Gluon Plasma which previously existed only a few microseconds after the Big Bang. We discuss the rich interdisciplinary connections of this
many-body physics to similar dynamics across wide energy scales, ranging from a quantum portrait of primordial Black Holes in gravity, to
topological ``transitions" in QCD, to that of turbulent non-thermal attractors in ultra-cold atomic gases.