Nuclear Theory/RIKEN Seminar

In collisions of heavy ions at ultrarelativistic energies, a system of hot and dense strongly interacting matter is created. This matter exhibits a surprisingly strong degree of collectivity, implying a short mean free path of its constituents and, consequently, a small shear viscosity-to-entropy density ratio. This allows to describe the evolution of the system using relativistic dissipative fluid dynamics. Dissipative fluid dynamics can be understood as an expansion around local thermodynamical equilibrium, corresponding to the ideal-fluid limit where dissipative corrections are absent. A short mean free path means that this expansion is well defined and converges sufficiently rapidly. Nevertheless, in the initial stage of a heavy-ion collision, space-time gradients of the fluid-dynamical fields (energy-momentum and net-charge densities) are so large that dissipative corrections to the ideal-fluid limit can become sizable. In this situation, novel approaches to relativistic dissipative fluid dynamics are called for. One such approach is anisotropic dissipative fluid dynamics, which is based on an expansion around an anisotropic non-equilibrium state (instead of local thermodynamical equilibrium, as in conventional dissipative fluid dynamics). In this talk, I present a derivation of the equations of motion of anisotropic dissipative fluid dynamics from the Boltzmann equation, using the method of moments. I also discuss how to resolve an ambiguity to close the system of equations of motion in the case when there are no corrections to the anisotropic state which constitutes the basis of the moment expansion.