Abstract
The quark-gluon plasma created in a relativistic heavy-ion collisions possesses a sizable pressure anisotropy in the local rest frame at very early times after the initial nuclear impact and this anisotropy only slowly relaxes as the system evolves. In a kinetic theory picture, this translates into the existence of sizable momentum-space anisotropies in the underlying partonic distribution functions, <p_L^2> << <p_T^2>. In such cases, it is better to reorganize the hydrodynamical expansion by taking into account momentum-space anisotropies at leading-order in the expansion instead of as a perturbative correction to an isotropic distribution. The resulting anisotropic hydrodynamics framework has been shown to more accurately describe the dynamics of rapidly expanding systems such as the quark-gluon plasma. In this proceedings contribution, I review the basic ideas of anisotropic hydrodynamics, recent progress, and present a few preliminary phenomenological predictions for identified particle spectra and elliptic flow.
Highlights
The phenomenological application of viscous hydrodynamics to the dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in heavy-ion collisions has been tremendously successful [1,2,3]
As was shown in Ref. [16], one finds that the standard method significantly underestimates the number of low pT hadrons, whereas the quasiparticle method for implementing the equation of state is in better agreement with standard second-order viscous hydrodynamics at low pT
The anisotropic hydrodynamics framework has been checked against exact solution of the Boltzmann equation in some non-trivial but simple cases in which exact solution is possible and one finds that, in all cases considered, the anisotropic hydrodynamics approach most accurately reproduces the evolution of the system
Summary
The phenomenological application of viscous hydrodynamics to the dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in heavy-ion collisions has been tremendously successful [1,2,3]. Despite this success, there are spacetime regions where standard viscous hydrodynamics is being pushed beyond its limits, such as at very early times after the initial heavy-ion collision τ < 1 fm/c and near the (semi)-dilute edges of the system. One cannot necessarily trust the high-momentum limit of production rates since this maps to regions in which the partonic distributions functions can become negative
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