Hydrodynamics and Flow

TL;DR

This paper provides an overview of relativistic hydrodynamics and its application to heavy ion collisions, discussing formalism, fundamental observables, and comparing ideal hydrodynamic models with experimental data.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive review of relativistic hydrodynamics formalism and its application to heavy ion collisions, including recent results and comparisons with experiments.

Findings

Elliptic flow as a key observable in heavy ion collisions

Comparison of ideal hydrodynamic calculations with experimental data

Discussion of collective flow phenomena

Abstract

In this lecture note, we present several topics on relativistic hydrodynamics and its application to relativistic heavy ion collisions. In the first part we give a brief introduction to relativistic hydrodynamics in the context of heavy ion collisions. In the second part we present the formalism and some fundamental aspects of relativistic ideal and viscous hydrodynamics. In the third part, we start with some basic checks of the fundamental observables followed by discussion of collective flow, in particular elliptic flow, which is one of the most exciting phenomenon in heavy ion collisions at relativistic energies. Next we discuss how to formulate the hydrodynamic model to describe dynamics of heavy ion collisions. Finally, we conclude the third part of the lecture note by showing some results from ideal hydrodynamic calculations and by comparing them with the experimental data.