Self-Consistent Conversion of a Viscous Fluid to Particles and Heavy-Ion Applications

The most widely used theoretical framework to model the early stages of a heavy-ion collision is viscous hydrodynamics. Comparing hydrodynamic simulations to heavy-ion data inevitably requires the conversion of the fluid to particles. This conversion, typically done in the Cooper-Frye formalism, is ambiguous for viscous fluids. In this thesis work, self-consistent phase space corrections are calculated by solving the linearized Boltzmann equation. These species-dependent solutions are contrasted with those obtained using the ad-hoc ``democratic Grad'' ansatz typically employed in the literature in which coefficients are independent of particle dynamics. Solutions are calculated analytically for a massless gas and numerically for the general case of a hadron resonance gas. For example, it is found that for a gas of massless particles interacting via isotropic, energy-independent 2 to 2 scatterings, the shear viscous corrections variationally prefer a momentum dependence close to p^3/2 rather than the quadratic dependence assumed in the Grad ansatz.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Physics & Astronomy

Year

2015

Author dc:creator

• Wolff, Zachary

Contributors dc:contributor

• Denes Molnar
• Andrew Hirsch
• Martin Kruczenski
• Wei Xie

• Freezeout
• LHC
• Particlization
• Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Shear Viscosity

Repository record dc:identifier

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/1436

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:docs.lib.purdue.edu:open_access_dissertations-2652