Quasinormal modes of nonthermal fixed points

Abstract: Quasinormal modes play a prominent role in relaxation of diverse physical systems to equilibria, ranging from astrophysical black holes to tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma at RHIC and LHC accelerators. We propose that a novel kind of quasinormal modes govern the direct approach to self-similar time evolution of nonthermal fixed points, whose relevance ranges from high energy physics to cold atom gases. We utilize black hole perturbation theory techniques to compute the spectrum of these far from equilibrium quasinormal modes for a kinetic theory with a Focker-Planck collision kernel in isotropic and homogeneous states. Our conclusion is that quasinormal modes of nonthermal fixed points give rise to a tower of progressively more decaying power-law contributions. A byproduct of our analysis is a precise determination and improved understanding of the distribution function characterizing nonthermal fixed points.