arXiv subjects

Gabriel S. Denicol

Publications and source records attributed to Gabriel S. Denicol.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

Electric Conductivity of a hot hadron gas from a kinetic approach

We calculate the electric conductivity of a gas of relativistic particles with isotropic cross sections using the Boltzmann equation as the starting point. Our analyses is restricted to elastic collisions. We show the perfect agreement with previously published numerical results for a massless quark- gluon plasma, and give results for the electric conductivity of an interacting hadron gas, employing realistic resonance cross sections. These results for the electric conductivity of a hot hadron gas, as created in (ultra-)relativistic heavy-ion collisions, are of rich phenomenological as well as theoretical interest and can be compared to, e.g., lattice quantum field theory calculations.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2016

Electromagnetic radiation as a probe of the initial state and of viscous dynamics in relativistic nuclear collisions

The penetrating nature of electromagnetic signals makes them suitable probes to explore the properties of the strongly-interacting medium created in relativistic nuclear collisions. We examine the effects of the initial conditions and shear relaxation time on the spectra and flow coefficients of electromagnetic probes, using an event-by-event 3+1D viscous hydrodynamic simulation (MUSIC).

nucl-th↗

arXiv2016

Direct photon production and jet energy-loss in small systems

Two types of penetrating probes, direct photon and QCD jets, are investigated in the background of a small and rapidly expanding droplet of quark-gluon plasma. The additional thermal electromagnetic radiation results in a $\sim$50\% enhancement of the direct photons. In high multiplicity p+Pb collisions, jets can lose a sizeable fraction of their initial energy, leading to a charged hadron $R_\mathrm{pA}$ of $\sim$0.8 at a transverse momentum around 10\,GeV. Those two proposed measurements can help understand the apparent collective behaviour observed in small collision systems.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2015

Perfect fluidity of a dissipative system: Analytical solution for the Boltzmann equation in $\mathrm{AdS}_{2}\otimes \mathrm{S}_{2}$

In this paper we obtain an analytical solution of the relativistic Boltzmann equation under the relaxation time approximation that describes the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a radially expanding massless gas. This solution is found by mapping this expanding system in flat spacetime to a static flow in the curved spacetime $\mathrm{AdS}_{2}\otimes \mathrm{S}_{2}$. We further derive explicit analytic expressions for the momentum dependence of the single particle distribution function as well as for the spatial dependence of its moments. We find that this dissipative system has the ability to flow as a perfect fluid even though its entropy density does not match the equilibrium form. The non-equilibrium contribution to the entropy density is shown to be due to higher order scalar moments (which possess no hydrodynamical interpretation) of the Boltzmann equation that can remain out of equilibrium but do not couple to the energy-momentum tensor of the system. Thus, in this system the slowly moving hydrodynamic degrees of freedom can exhibit true perfect fluidity while being totally decoupled from the fast moving, non-hydrodynamical microscopic degrees of freedom that lead to entropy production.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2015

Dilepton emission in high-energy heavy-ion collisions with dissipative hydrodynamics

In this contribution we study the effects of three transport coefficients of dissipative hydrodynamics on thermal dilepton anisotropic flow observables. The first two transport coefficients investigated influence the overall size and growth rate of shear viscous pressure, while the last transport coefficient governs the magnitude of net baryon number diffusion in relativistic dissipative fluid dynamics. All calculations are done using state-of-the-art 3+1D hydrodynamical simulations. We show that thermal dileptons are sensitive probes of the transport coefficients of dissipative hydrodynamics.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2015

Probing the dissipative properties of a strongly interacting medium with dileptons

We investigate the effects of the presence of a non-vanishing net baryon number density and its diffusion on dilepton production, within a hydrodynamical description of the medium created at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7$ GeV collision energy. This energy value is explored within the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Particular attention is devoted to a new dissipative degree of freedom: the net baryon number diffusion ($V^μ$), and to the net baryon number conductivity ($κ$) | a transport coefficients governing the overall magnitude of $V^μ$. The effects of $κ$ on dilepton production are assessed, with an outlook on how future experimental dilepton data can be used to learn more about $κ$.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2015

The domain of validity of fluid dynamics and the onset of cavitation in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions

If the bulk viscosity of QCD matter is large, the effective pressure of the hot and dense matter created in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions can become negative, leading to instabilities in the evolution of the plasma. In the context of heavy ion collisions, this effect is sometimes referred to as cavitation. In this contribution we discuss the onset of cavitation in event-by-event hydrodynamic simulations of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at LHC energies. We estimate how large the bulk viscosity of the QGP has to be in the QCD (pseudo) phase transition region in order for the effective pressure of the system to actually become negative.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2014

Studying the validity of relativistic hydrodynamics with a new exact solution of the Boltzmann equation

We present an exact solution to the Boltzmann equation which describes a system undergoing boost-invariant longitudinal and azimuthally symmetric radial expansion for arbitrary shear viscosity to entropy density ratio. This new solution is constructed by considering the conformal map between Minkowski space and the direct product of three dimensional de Sitter space with a line. The resulting solution respects SO(3)_q x SO(1,1) x Z_2 symmetry. We compare the exact kinetic solution with exact solutions of the corresponding macroscopic equations that were obtained from the kinetic theory in ideal and second-order viscous hydrodynamic approximations. The macroscopic solutions are obtained in de Sitter space and are subject to the same symmetries used to obtain the exact kinetic solution.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2014

A new exact solution of the relativistic Boltzmann equation and its hydrodynamic limit

We present an exact solution of the relativistic Boltzmann equation for a system undergoing boost-invariant longitudinal and azimuthally symmetric transverse flow ("Gubser flow"). The resulting exact non-equilibrium dynamics is compared to 1st- and 2nd-order relativistic hydrodynamic approximations for various shear viscosity to entropy density ratios. This novel solution can be used to test the validity and accuracy of different hydrodynamic approximations in conditions similar to those generated in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2014

Shear-bulk coupling in nonconformal hydrodynamics

We compute the temporal evolution of the pressure anisotropy and bulk pressure of a massive gas using second-order viscous hydrodynamics and anisotropic hydrodynamics. We then compare our results with an exact solution of the Boltzmann equation for a massive gas in the relaxation time approximation. We demonstrate that, within second-order viscous hydrodynamics, the inclusion of the full set of kinetic coefficients, particularly the shear-bulk couplings, is necessary to properly describe the time evolution of the bulk pressure. We also compare the results of second-order hydrodynamics with those obtained using the anisotropic hydrodynamics approach. We find that anisotropic hydrodynamics and second-order viscous hydrodynamics including the shear-bulk couplings are both able to reproduce the exact evolution with comparable accuracy.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2014

Probing the non-equilibrium dynamics of hot and dense QCD with dileptons

It is argued that, in heavy ion collisions, thermal dileptons are good probes of the transport properties of the medium created in such events, and also of its early-time dynamics, usually inaccessible to hadronic observables. In this work we show that electromagnetic azimuthal momentum anisotropies do not only display a sensitivity to the shear relaxation time and to the initial shear-stress tensor profile, but also to the temperature dependence of the shear viscosity coefficient.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2014

Probing the early-time dynamics of relativistic heavy-ion collisions with electromagnetic radiation

Using 3+1D viscous relativistic fluid dynamics, we show that electromagnetic probes are sensitive to the initial conditions and to the out-of-equilibrium features of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Within the same approach, we find that hadronic observables show a much lesser sensitivity to these aspects. We conclude that electromagnetic observables allow access to dynamical regions that are beyond the reach of soft hadronic probes.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2014

Jet quenching effects on the anisotropic flow at RHIC

In this article we investigate how the energy and momentum deposited by partonic dijets in the quark-gluon plasma may perturb the geometry-induced hydrodynamic expansion of the bulk nuclear matter created in heavy ion collisions at RHIC. The coupling between the jets and the medium is done through a source term in the energy-momentum conservation equations for ideal hydrodynamics. We concentrate our attention at mid-rapidity and solve the equations event-by-event imposing boost-invariance. For $p_T \gtrsim 1$ GeV the anisotropic flow is found to be considerably enhanced, if the dijets deposit on average more than 12 GeV in the medium (or equivalently 6 GeV for each jet of the pair), which corresponds, in our model, to an average suppression greater than $65\%$ of the initial jet transverse energy.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2014

Elliptic Flow Suppression due to Hadron Mass Spectrum

Hadron resonance gas models provide a good description of the equation of state of quantum chromodynamics determined by lattice QCD calculations at temperatures $T \sim 100-155$ MeV. In this paper we investigate the effects of an exponentially increasing hadron mass spectrum (Hagedorn spectrum) on the azimuthal anisotropy of the rapidly expanding matter formed in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. If the temperature at which the conversion from fluid degrees of freedom to hadrons is sufficiently close to the Hagedorn temperature, the production of Hagedorn resonances suppresses the differential elliptic flow of all hadron species.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2014

Jet quenching effects on the direct, elliptic, and triangular flow at RHIC

In this paper we investigate how the energy and momentum deposited by partonic dijets in the quark-gluon plasma may affect the direct, elliptic and triangular flow of low (and intermediate) $p_T$ hadrons in central Au+Au collisions at RHIC. The dijets are modeled as external sources in the energy-momentum conservation equations for hydrodynamics, which are solved on an event-by-event basis within the ideal fluid approximation. We focus our investigation at mid-rapidity and solve the hydrodynamic equations imposing boost invariance. Differential anisotropic flow coefficients for $p_T \gtrsim 1$ GeV are found to be significantly enhanced if the dijets deposit on average more than 12 GeV in the QGP (or more than 6 GeV per jet). Because this jet-induced extra anisotropic flow is not related to the fluctuations of the initial geometry of the collision, the correlation between the $v_2$ and $v_3$ coefficients and their corresponding eccentricities is considerably weakened. In addition, we argue that the extra amount of direct flow induced by dijets may be quantified by comparing the azimuthal dependence of dihadron correlations in dijet events with the corresponding quantity obtained in events without dijets. This comparison could be used to give a rough estimate of the magnitude of the effective coupling between the jets and the medium.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2014

Dynamics and Stability of Chiral Fluid

Starting from the linear sigma model with constituent quarks we derive the chiral fluid dynamics where hydrodynamic equations for the quark fluid are coupled to the equation of motion for the order-parameter field. In a static system at thermal equilibrium this model leads to a chiral phase transition which, depending on the choice of the quark-meson coupling constant, could be a crossover or a first order one. We investigate the stability of the chiral fluid in the static and expanding backgrounds by considering the evolution of perturbations with respect to the mean-field solution. In the static background the spectrum of plane-wave perturbations consists of two branches, one corresponding to the sound waves and another to the sigma-meson excitations. For large couplings these two branches "cross" and the excitation spectrum acquires exponentially growing modes. The stability analysis is also done for the Bjorken-like background solution by explicitly solving the time-dependent differential equation for perturbations in the eta-space. In this case the growth rate of unstable modes is significantly reduced.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2013

On the fluid behavior of a baryon rich hadron resonance gas

We investigate the effects of finite baryon chemical potential on the transport properties of a hadron resonance gas. We find that a hadron resonance gas with large baryon number density is closer to the ideal fluid limit than the corresponding gas with zero baryon number. This suggests that the system created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at lower collision energies may behave as a fluid, with an effective fluidity close to the one found at RHIC's highest energy near phase transition. This might explain why the differential elliptic flow coefficient measured at lower collisional energies at RHIC is similar to the one observed at high energies.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2013

Solutions of Conformal Israel-Stewart Relativistic Viscous Fluid Dynamics

We use symmetry arguments developed by Gubser to construct the first radially-expanding explicit solutions of the Israel-Stewart formulation of hydrodynamics. Along with a general semi-analytical solution, an exact analytical solution is given which is valid in the cold plasma limit where viscous effects from shear viscosity and the relaxation time coefficient are important. The radially expanding solutions presented in this paper can be used as nontrivial checks of numerical algorithms employed in hydrodynamic simulations of the quark-gluon plasma formed in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. We show this explicitly by comparing such analytic and semi-analytic solutions with the corresponding numerical solutions obtained using the MUSIC viscous hydrodynamics simulation code.

nucl-th↗