Holographic isotropisation in Gauss-Bonnet gravity

We study holographic isotropisation of homogeneous, strongly coupled, non-Abelian plasmas in Gauss-Bonnet gravity with a negative cosmological constant. We focus on small values of the Gauss-Bonnet coupling parameter lambda(GB) and linearise the equations of motion around a time-dependent background solution with lambda(GB) = 0. We numerically solve the linearised equations and show that the entire time evolution of the pressure anisotropy can be well approximated by the linear in lambda(GB) corrections to the quasinormal mode expansion, even in the cases of high anisotropy. We finally show that, quite generally, the time evolution of the pressure anisotropy with the Gauss-Bonnet term is approximately shifted with respect to the evolution without it, with the sign of the shift being directly related to the sign of the lambda(GB) parameter. Combined with the observation that negative lambda(GB) captures qualitative features of positive gauge coupling corrections, this suggests that the latter generically increase the isotropisation time of strongly coupled plasmas.