Coupling hydrodynamics to nonequilibrium degrees of freedom in strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma.

Relativistic hydrodynamics simulations of quark-gluon plasma play a pivotal role in our understanding of heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC. They are based on a phenomenological description due to Müller, Israel, Stewart (MIS) and others, which incorporates viscous effects and ensures a well-posed initial value problem. Focusing on the case of conformal plasma we propose a generalization which includes, in addition, the dynamics of the least damped far-from-equilibrium degree of freedom found in strongly coupled plasmas through the AdS/CFT correspondence. We formulate new evolution equations for general flows and then test them in the case of N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma by comparing their solutions alongside solutions of MIS theory with numerical computations of isotropization and boost-invariant flow based on holography. In these tests the new equations reproduce the results of MIS theory when initialized close to the hydrodynamic stage of evolution, but give a more accurate description of the dynamics when initial conditions are set in the preequilibrium regime.

Hydrodynamic gradient expansion in gauge theory plasmas.

We utilize the fluid-gravity duality to investigate the large order behavior of hydrodynamic gradient expansion of the dynamics of a gauge theory plasma system. This corresponds to the inclusion of dissipative terms and transport coefficients of very high order. Using the dual gravity description, we calculate numerically the form of the stress tensor for a boost-invariant flow in a hydrodynamic expansion up to terms with 240 derivatives. We observe a factorial growth of gradient contributions at large orders, which indicates a zero radius of convergence of the hydrodynamic series. Furthermore, we identify the leading singularity in the Borel transform of the hydrodynamic energy density with the lowest nonhydrodynamic excitation corresponding to a 'nonhydrodynamic' quasinormal mode on the gravity side.

Characteristics of thermalization of boost-invariant plasma from holography.

We report on the approach toward the hydrodynamic regime of boost-invariant N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma at strong coupling starting from various far-from-equilibrium states at τ=0. The results are obtained through a numerical solution of Einstein's equations for the dual geometries, as described in detail in the companion article [M. P. Heller, R. A. Janik, and P. Witaszczyk, arXiv:1203.0755]. Despite the very rich far-from-equilibrium evolution, we find surprising regularities in the form of clear correlations between initial entropy and total produced entropy, as well as between initial entropy and the temperature at thermalization, understood as the transition to a hydrodynamic description. For 29 different initial conditions that we consider, hydrodynamics turns out to be definitely applicable for proper times larger than 0.7 in units of inverse temperature at thermalization. We observe a sizable anisotropy in the energy-momentum tensor at thermalization, which is nevertheless entirely due to hydrodynamic effects. This suggests that effective thermalization in heavy-ion collisions may occur significantly earlier than true thermalization.