Toward the AdS/CFT dual of the 'Little Bang'

This (rather subjective) review sums up a few years of work devoted to explain various aspects of high-energy heavy-ion collisions using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The central issue is the formation of the black hole, surrounded by the trapped surface. This phenomenon is seen by a distant observer as the equilibration and the entropy production. We end up discussing an issue of classical gravitational radiation by an ultrarelativistic falling particle and the so-called self-force related to it.