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Can a simple dimension trick model the quark-gluon plasma?
Emilio Torrente-Lujan
May 22, 2026
By compactifying a higher-dimensional neutral fluid onto a group manifold — a mathematical trick called Scherk-Schwarz reduction — the off-diagonal stress components automatically become non-Abelian color currents, with viscosity and heat conductivity picking up clean exponential factors. The result is a fully dissipative colored fluid whose transport coefficients satisfy the second law by inheritance from the parent theory. It's a toy model, but one that could give heavy-ion physicists a tractable analytic handle on quark-gluon plasma dynamics.
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