Collisions with black holes and deconfined plasmas

We use AdS/CFT to investigate i) high energy collisions with balls of deconfined plasma surrounded by a confining phase and ii) the rapid localized heating of a deconfined plasma. Both of these processes are dual to collisions with black holes, where they result in the nucleation of a new 'arm' of the horizon reaching out in the direction of the incident object. We study the resulting non-equilibrium dynamics in a universal limit of the gravitational physics which may indicate universal behavior of deconfined plasmas at large Nc. Process (i) produces 'virtual' arms of the plasma ball, while process (ii) can nucleate surprisingly large bubbles of a higher temperature phase