arXiv subjects

Mike McNelis

Publications and source records attributed to Mike McNelis.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamic simulations of ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions

We develop a far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamic model to evolve ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions in event-by-event simulations. Anisotropic hydrodynamics is designed to better handle the strong and highly anisotropic expansion during the early stages of the collision. The large gradients cause conventional second-order viscous hydrodynamic approaches to break down at early times. Anisotropic hydrodynamics evolves the large pressure anisotropies present in the quark-gluon plasma non-perturbatively, which prevents negative longitudinal pressures from developing even under extreme conditions. This increased stability allows us to start anisotropic hydrodynamics already at a very early longitudinal proper time to evolve the pre-hydrodynamic stage. In current pre-hydrodynamic models, the equation of state is not consistent with the QCD equation of state used in the subsequent fluid dynamic stage. Since our approach avoids this inconsistency, we are able to achieve a smooth transition to non-conformal viscous hydrodynamics as the gradients decrease over time. For our first phenomenological application, we apply our new simulation to model fluctuating Pb+Pb collisions at LHC energies ($\sqrt{s_\text{NN}} = 2.76$ TeV) and find that our preliminary calculations for the hadronic observables are in excellent agreement with the experimental data.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Hydrodynamic generators in relativistic kinetic theory

We resum the non-equilibrium gradient corrections to a single-particle distribution function evolved by the Boltzmann equation in the relaxation time approximation (RTA). We first study a system undergoing Bjorken expansion and show that, for a constant relaxation time, the exact solution of the RTA Boltzmann equation at late times (i.e. after the decay of non-hydrodynamic modes) generates the Borel resummed Chapman-Enskog series. Extending this correspondence to systems without Bjorken symmetry, we construct a (3+1)-dimensional hydrodynamic generator for RTA kinetic theory, which is an integral representation of the Chapman-Enskog series in the limit of vanishing non-hydrodynamic modes. Relaxing this limit we find at earlier times a set of non-hydrodynamic modes coupled to the Chapman-Enskog expansion. Including the dynamics of these non-hydrodynamic modes is shown to control the emergence of hydrodynamics as an effective field theory description of non-equilibrium fluids, which works well even for far-off-equilibrium situations where the Knudsen number is initially large.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2020

Particlization in fluid dynamical simulations of heavy-ion collisions: The iS3D module

The iS3D particlization module simulates the emission of hadrons from heavy-ion collisions via Monte-Carlo sampling of the Cooper-Frye formula which converts fluid dynamical information into local phase-space distributions for hadrons. The code package includes multiple choices for the non-equilibrium correction to these distribution functions: the 14-moment approximation, first-order Chapman-Enskog expansion, and two types of modified equilibrium distributions. This makes it possible to explore to what extent heavy-ion experimental data are sensitive to different choices for $δf_n$, presently the main source of theoretical uncertainty in the particlization stage. We validate our particle sampler with a high degree of precision by generating several million hadron emission events from a longitudinally boost-invariant hypersurface and comparing the event-averaged particle spectra and space-time distributions to the Cooper-Frye formula.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2018

Viscous hydrodynamics for nonconformal anisotropic fluids

A new formulation of (3+1)-dimensional anisotropic hydrodynamics is presented that accounts nonperturbatively for the large longitudinal-transverse pressure anisotropy and bulk viscous pressure in heavy-ion collisions. The initialization of the anisotropic hydrodynamic stage is discussed, and a comparison to standard viscous hydrodynamics for (0+1)- dimensional Bjorken expansion is presented.

nucl-th↗