Evolutions in first-order viscous hydrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper uses holography to evaluate the applicability and accuracy of various first-order relativistic viscous hydrodynamics theories in modeling quark-gluon plasma dynamics.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of BDNK, BRSSS, and ideal hydrodynamics using holographic initial data and real-time evolution in 2+1D conformal fluids.

Findings

BDNK and BRSSS theories accurately describe early-time dynamics.

Ideal hydrodynamics fails to capture viscous effects.

Holographic initial data helps assess hydrodynamics theories' predictive power.

Abstract

Motivated by the physics of the quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collision experiments, we use holography to study the regime of applicability of various theories of relativistic viscous hydrodynamics. Using the microscopic description provided by holography of a system that relaxes to equilibrium, we obtain initial data with which we perform real-time evolutions in 2+1 dimensional conformal fluids using the first-order viscous relativistic hydrodynamics theory of Bemfica, Disconzi, Noronha and Kovtun (BDNK), BRSSS and ideal hydrodynamics. By initializing the hydrodynamics codes at different times, we can check the constitutive relations and assess the predictive power and accuracy of each of these theories.