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 i i) 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 N-c. Process ( i) produces " virtual" arms of the plasma ball, while process ( i i) can nucleate surprisingly large bubbles of a higher temperature phase.