Adiabatic hydrodynamization and quasinormal modes of nonthermal attractors

Abstract: Nonthermal attractors characterize the emergent self-similar evolution of far-from-equilibrium quantum systems, from nuclear collisions to cold-atom experiments. Within the adiabatic hydrodynamization framework, the approach to the nonthermal attractor can be understood as the decay of excited states of an effective Hamiltonian. We use an exactly solvable case of the Boltzmann equation -- the longitudinally expanding overoccupied gluon plasma dominated by small-angle elastic collisions -- to map the eigenmodes in adiabatic hydrodynamization to the quasinormal mode spectrum of the nonthermal attractor. If generalized, this equivalence may be used as a discovery tool for new phenomena in out-of-equilibrium systems. A byproduct of our analysis is the analytic prescaling solutions for systems undergoing strong longitudinal expansion.