Thermalization in QCD: theoretical approaches, phenomenological applications, and interdisciplinary connections

Heavy-ion collisions at BNL's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) and CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provide strong evidence for the formation of a quark-gluon plasma, with temperatures extracted from relativistic viscous hydrodynamic simulations shown to be well above the transition temperature from hadron matter. How the strongly correlated quark-gluon matter forms in a heavy-ion collision, its properties off-equilibrium, and the...