Non-equilibrium hydrodynamics of the quark-gluon plasma

TL;DR

This dissertation develops and applies anisotropic hydrodynamics models, including a novel quasiparticle approach, to accurately describe the non-equilibrium behavior of the quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions, aligning well with experimental data.

Contribution

Introduces a quasiparticle anisotropic hydrodynamics model incorporating realistic equations of state and non-conformal effects for better QGP description.

Findings

Model predictions agree with experimental data

Quasiparticle aHydro effectively includes non-conformal effects

Self-energy calculations provide insights into quark and gluon interactions

Abstract

My dissertation is about the formulation and application of anisotropic hydrodynamics as a successful non-equilibrium hydrodynamics model for studying the QGP. For this purpose, I introduce the basic conformal anisotropic hydrodynamics formalism and then explain the ways we included realistic features (bulk degree of freedom, quasiparticle implementation of realistic equation of state, more realistic collisional kernel), to make it a suitable hydrodynamics model for studying the QGP generated in heavy-ion collisions. For verification of our model we have compared the evolution of model parameters predicted by aHydro and vHydro, with exact solution of the Boltzmann equation. However, the system is not conformal and the aHydro needed to be improved to include a realistic prescription for the equation of state which takes care of non-ideal effect in the dynamics. I have then designed a novel method for implementing the realistic equation of state (provided by lattice QCD) in the aHydro formalism. This model, called the quasiparticle aHydro model, integrates the non-conformal effects in the aHydro model. The non-conformal effects are due to strong interactions of plasma constituents which leads to temperature-dependence of the particles' effective mass in the system. Based on the quasiparticle picture, we have developed the quasiparticle aHydro (aHydroQP) model. We have then compared the phenomenological predictions of the aHydroQP model with experimental observations. Comparisons illustrate a high level of consistency between our model and the experimental data. Finally, I have calculated the quark self-energy in an anisotropic QGP. The quark self-energy is important because it encodes the way quarks gain interactional mass while in the hot QGP. I also have presented the calculation of gluon self-energy in hard loop approximation in an anisotropic QGP.