In this work we study the relativistic kinetic theory of a boost-invariant conformal gas on a static, maximally symmetric background dS3 & times; , considering all constant-curvature slicings of dS3-flat, spherical, or hyperbolic-and their associated symmetry groups. Using a symmetry-driven cotangent bundle approach, we show that the isometry group of each slicing acts on phase space in such a way that only its Casimir invariants and the timelike coordinate are unconstrained, so the distribution function depends solely on these quantities. This yields a unified boost-invariant exact solution of the Boltzmann equation valid for each constant-curvature foliation of dS3 & times; . Specializing this general solution to the flat and spherical foliations reproduces the Bjorken and Gubser flows, respectively, while its restriction to the hyperbolic foliation produces a genuinely new analytic solution ("Grozdanov flow"). Hydrodynamics and free streaming emerge naturally as limiting regimes of this novel exact solution. We further comment on several relevant aspects of the new boost-invariant solution on the hyperbolic slicing and on their interpretation once mapped back to Minkowski space.

In this work we investigate the impact of conformal symmetry breaking on hydrodynamization of a far-from-equilibrium fluid. We find a new kind of transseries solutions for the non-conformal hydrodynamic equations of a longitudinal boost invariant expanding plasma. The new transseries solutions unveil a rich physical structure which arises due to the interplay of different physical scales. In the perfect fluid case the non-conformal speed of sound slows down the cooling of the temperature due to the emergence of logarithmic corrections that depends on the mass of the particle. These terms propagate into the perturbative and non-perturbative sectors of the transseries once viscous corrections are included. The logarithmic mass contributions increase the asymptotic value of the Knudsen number while decreasing the damping rate of the transient non-hydrodynamic modes and thus, yielding to an extremely slow hydrodynamization process where flow lines merge to their forward attractor at extremely late times. The early time free streaming expansion is modified and receives logarithmic mass corrections induced by the shear-bulk couplings. The global flow structure and numerical analyses carried out in our work demonstrate the existence of the early and late-time attractors for the shear viscous tensor and bulk viscous pressure.

Heavy-ion collisions can be well described through relativistic viscous hydrodynamics, but questions still remain when hydrodynamics is applicable because the initial state may begin very far-from-equilibrium. Thus, a pre-equilibrium evolution phase is used to bridge the gap between the initial state and hydrodynamics. K$\phi$MP$\phi$ST is one such pre-equilibrium model that propagates the energy-momentum tensor by decomposing it into the background and fluctuations around that background, whose evolution is captured by Green's functions. We extend this formalism to include conserved charges and calculate the corresponding non-equilibrium Green's functions in the relaxation time approximation. The ICCING algorithm initializes conserved charges in the initial state by sampling $g \rightarrow q\bar{q}$ splitting probabilities and is, thus, perfectly positioned to implement Green's functions for charge propagation. We show that this method alters the initial state charge geometries and is applicable in central to mid-central collisions.

We formulate the first-order dissipative anisotropic hydrodynamical theory for a relativistic conformal uncharged fluid, which generalizes the Bemfica-Disconzi-Noronha-Kovtun first-order viscous fluid framework. Our approach maintains causal behavior in the nonlinear regime with or without general relativity coupling, and we derive and analyze the constraints on transport coefficients imposed by causality. We demonstrate the causal and stable behavior of our theory in specific cases, including the discussion of nonlinear causality as well as stability for linearized perturbations. We apply our newly developed first-order anisotropic theory to the Bjorken flow and show how causality and stability impose constraints on the behavior of the early-time attractor.

The Beam Energy Scan Theory (BEST) Collaboration was formed with the goal of providing a theoretical framework for analyzing data from the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program at the relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The physics goal of the BES program is the search for a conjectured QCD critical point as well as for manifestations of the chiral magnetic effect. We describe progress that has been made over the previous five years. This includes studies of the equation of state and equilibrium susceptibilities, the development of suitable initial state models, progress in constructing a hydrodynamic framework that includes fluctuations and anomalous transport effects, as well as the development of freezeout prescriptions and hadronic transport models. Finally, we address the challenge of integrating these components into a complete analysis framework. This document describes the collective effort of the BEST Collaboration and its collaborators around the world.

While it is well known that there is a significant amount of conserved charges in the initial state of nuclear collisions, the production of these due to gluon splitting has yet to be thoroughly investigated. The ICCING (Initial Conserved Charges in Nuclear Geometry) algorithm reconstructs these quark distributions, providing conserved strange, baryon, and electric charges, by sampling a given model for the g → qq¯ splitting function over the initial energy density, which is valid at top collider energies, even when µB = 0. The ICCING algorithm includes fluctuations in the gluon longitudinal momenta, a structure that supports the implementation of dynamical processes, and the c++ version is now open-source. A full analysis of parameter choices on the model has been done to quantify the effect these have on the underlying physics. We find there is a sustained difference across the different charges that indicates sensitivity to hot spot geometry.

At top collider energies where baryon stopping is negligible, the initial state of heavy-ion collisions is overall charge neutral and predominantly composed of gluons. Nevertheless, there can also be significant local fluctuations of the baryon number, strangeness, and electric charge densities about zero, perturbatively corresponding to the production of quark/antiquark pairs. These previously ignored local charge fluctuations can permit the study of charge diffusion in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), even at top collider energies. In this paper we present a new model denoted ICCING (initial conserved charges in nuclear geometry) which can reconstruct the initial conditions of conserved charges in the QGP by sampling a (g -> q (q) over bar) splitting probability over the initial energy density. We find that the new charge distributions generally differ from the bulk energy density; in particular, the strangeness distribution is significantly more eccentric than standard bulk observables and appears to be associated with the geometry of hot spots in the initial state. The new information provided by these conserved charges opens the door to studying a wealth of new charge- and flavor-dependent correlations in the initial state and ultimately the charge transport parameters of the QGP.

We investigate the non-linear transport processes and hydrodynamization of a system of gluons undergoing longitudinal boost-invariant expansion. The dynamics is described within the framework of the Boltzmann equation in the small-angle approximation. The kinetic equations for a suitable set of moments of the one-particle distribution function are derived. By investigating the stability and asymptotic resurgent properties of this dynamical system, we demonstrate, that its solutions exhibit a rather different behavior for large (UV) and small (IR) effective Knudsen numbers. Close to the forward attractor in the IR regime the constitutive relations of each moment can be written as a multiparameter transseries. This resummation scheme allows us to extend the definition of a transport coefficient to the non-equilibrium regime naturally. Each transport coefficient is renormalized by the non-perturbative contributions of the non-hydrodynamic modes. The Knudsen number dependence of the transport coefficient is governed by the corresponding renormalization group flow equation. An interesting feature of the Yang-Mills plasma in this regime is that it exhibits transient non-Newtonian behavior while hydrodynamizing. In the UV regime the solution for the moments can be written as a power-law asymptotic series with a finite radius of convergence. We show that radius of convergence of the UV perturbative expansion grows linearly as a function of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio. Finally, we compare the universal properties in the pullback and forward attracting regions to other kinetic models including the relaxation time approximation and the effective kinetic Arnold-Moore-Yaffe (AMY) theory.

It is frequently supposed that quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions undergoes free streaming at early times. We examine this issue based on the assumption that a universal attractor dominates the dynamics already at the earliest stages, which offers a way to connect the initial state with the start of the hydrodynamic expansion in an approximate but conceptually transparent fashion. We demonstrate that the centrality dependence of the measured particle multiplicities can be used to quantitatively constrain the pressure anisotropy and find that it strongly depends on the model of the initial energy deposition. As an illustration, we compare three initial state models and show that they predict rather different early-time values of the pressure anisotropy. This suggests that while assuming free streaming prior to hydrodynamization may be compatible with some initial state models, in general, features of the prehydrodynamic flow need to be matched with the model of the initial state.

In this work we introduce the generic conditions for the existence of a non-equilibrium attractor that is an invariant manifold determined by the long-wavelength modes of the physical system. We investigate the topological properties of the global flow structure of the Gubser flow for the Israel-Stewart theory and a kinetic model for the Boltzmann equation by employing Morse-Smale theory. We present a complete classification of the invariant submanifolds of the flow and determine all the possible flow lines connecting any pair of UV/IR fixed points. The formal transseries solutions to the Gubser dynamical system around the early-time (UV) and late-time (IR) fixed points are constructed and analyzed. It is proven that these solutions are purely perturbative (or power-law asymptotic) series with a finite radius of convergence. Based on these analyses, we find that Gubser-like expanding kinetic systems do not hydrodynamize owing to the failure of the hydrodynamization process which heavily relies on the classification of (non)hydrodynamic modes in the IR regime. This is in contrast to longitudinal boost-invariant plasmas where the asymptotic dynamics is described by a few terms of the hydrodynamic gradient expansion. We finally compare our results for both Bjorken and Gubser conformal kinetic models.

Non-equilibrium Green's functions provide an efficient way to describe the evolution of the energy-momentum tensor during the early time pre-equilibrium stage of high-energy heavy ion collisions. Besides their practical relevance they also provide a meaningful way to address the question when and to what extent a hydrodynamic description of the system becomes applicable. Within the kinetic theory framework we derive a new method to calculate time dependent non-equilibrium Green's functions describing the evolution of energy and momentum perturbations on top of an evolving far-from-equilibrium background. We discuss the approach towards viscous hydrodynamics along with the emergence of various scaling phenomena for conformal systems. By comparing our results obtained in the relaxation time approximation to previous calculations in Yang-Mills kinetic theory, we further address the question which macroscopic features of the energy momentum tensor are sensitive to the underlying microscopic dynamics.

We discuss the non-equilibrium attractors of systems undergoing Gubser flow within kinetic theory by means of nonlinear dynamical systems. We obtain the attractors of anisotropic hydrodynamics, Israel-Stewart (IS) and transient fluid (DNMR) theories. These attractors are non-planar and the basin of attraction is three dimensional. We compare the asymptotic attractors of each hydrodynamic model with the one obtained from the exact Gubser solution of the Boltzmann equation within the relaxation time approximation. Anisotropic hydrodynamics matches, up to high numerical accuracy, the attractor of the exact theory while the other hydrodynamic theories fail to do so. Thus, anisotropic hydrodynamics is an effective theory for far-from-equilibrium fluids, which consists of the dissipative (nonperturbative) contributions at any order in the gradient expansion.

In this contribution, we report our recent findings on the phenomenological applications of non-equilibrium attractors to transport phenomena in fluid dynamics. Within the kinetic theory description, we study the non-linear hydrodynamization processes of a relativistic fluid undergoing Bjorken flow. The mathematical problem of solving the Boltzmann equation with a time-dependent relaxation time is recast into an infinite set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations for the moments of the one-particle distribution function. The constitutive relations of each non-hydrodynamic mode can be written as a multi-parameter trans-series that encodes the non-perturbative dissipative contributions quantified by the Knudsen Kn and inverse Reynolds Re−1 numbers. At a given order in the gradient expansion, we show that summing over all the non-perturbative sectors leads to a renormalized transport coefficient. The universal behavior of the renormalized shear viscosity is determined by the Lyapunov exponent and the anomalous dimension of the first moment at the stable fixed point. We comment on the relation between our findings and the physics of non-Newtonian fluids.

We investigate the impact of hydrodynamic fluctuations on correlation functions in a scale invariant fluid with a conserved U(1) charge. The kinetic equations for the two-point functions of pressure, momentum, and heat energy densities are derived within the framework of stochastic hydrodynamics. The leading nonanalytic contributions to the energy-momentum tensor as well as the U(1) current are determined from the solutions to these kinetic equations. In the case of a static homogeneous background we show that the long time tails obtained from hydrokinetic equations reproduce the one-loop results derived from statistical field theory. We use these results to establish bounds on transport coefficients. We generalize the stochastic equation to a background flow undergoing Bjorken expansion. We compute the leading fractional power O((tau T)(-3/2)) correction to the U(1) current and compare with the first-order gradient term.

In this paper, we compute a number of cross sections for the production of multiple particles at mid-rapidity in the semi-dilute / dense regime of the color-glass condensate (CGC) effective field theory. In particular, we present new results for the production of two quark-antiquark pairs (whether the same or different flavors) and for the production of one quark-antiquark pair and a gluon. We also demonstrate the existence of a simple mapping which transforms the cross section to produce a quark-antiquark pair into the corresponding cross section to produce a gluon, which we use to obtain various results and to cross-check them against the literature. We also discuss hadronization effects in the heavy flavor sector, writing explicit expressions for the production of various combinations of D and \( \overline{D} \) mesons, J/ψ mesons, and light hadrons. The various multiparticle cross sections presented here contain a wealth of information and can be used to study heavy flavor production, charge-dependent correlations, and “collective” flow phenomena arising from initial-state dynamics.

We study the behavior of the bulk viscosity $\zeta$ in QCD near a possible critical endpoint in the phase diagram. We verify the expectation that $(\zeta/s)\sim a(\xi/\xi_0)^{x_\zeta}$, where $s$ is the entropy density, $\xi$ is the correlation length, $\xi_0$ is the non-critical correlation length, $a$ is a constant and $x_\zeta\simeq 3$. Using a recently developed equation of state that includes a critical point in the universality class of the Ising model we estimate the constant of proportionality $a$. We find that $a$ is typically quite small, $a\sim O(10^{-4})$. We observe, however, that the result is sensitive to the commonly made assumption that the Ising temperature axis is approximately aligned with the QCD baryon chemical potential axis. If this is not the case, then the critical $\zeta/s$ can approach the non-critical value of $\eta/s$, where $\eta$ is the shear viscosity, even if the enhancement of the correlation length is modest, $\xi/\xi_0\sim 2$.

For the Bjorken flow we investigate the hydrodynamization of different modes of the one-particle distribution function by analyzing its relativistic kinetic equations. We calculate the constitutive relations of each mode written as a multi-parameter trans-series encoding the non-perturbative dissipative contributions quantified by the Knudsen Kn and inverse Reynolds Re−1 numbers. At any given order in the asymptotic expansion of each mode, the transport coefficients get effectively renormalized by summing over all non-perturbative sectors appearing in the trans-series. This gives an effective description of the transport coefficients that provides a new renormalization scheme with an associated renormalization group equation, going beyond the realms of linear response theory. As a result, the renormalized transport coefficients feature a transition to their equilibrium fixed point, which is a neat diagnostics of transient non-Newtonian behavior. As a proof of principle, we verify the predictions of the effective theory with the numerical solutions of their corresponding evolution equations. Our studies strongly suggest that the phenomenological success of fluid dynamics far from local thermal equilibrium is due to the transient rheological behavior of the fluid.

We initialize the Quantum Chromodynamic conserved charges of baryon number, strangeness, and electric charge arising from gluon splitting into quark-antiquark pairs for the initial conditions of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A new Monte Carlo procedure that can sample from a generic energy density profile is presented, called Initial Conserved Charges in Nuclear Geometry (ICCING), based on quark and gluon multiplicities derived within the color glass condensate (CGC) effective theory. We find that while baryon number and electric charge have nearly identical geometries to the energy density profile, the initial strangeness distribution is considerable more eccentric and is produced primarily at the hot spots corresponding to temperatures of $T\gtrsim 400$ MeV for PbPb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=5.02$ TeV.

At top collider energies where baryon stopping is negligible, the initial state of heavy ion collisions is overall charge neutral and predominantly composed of gluons. Nevertheless, there can also be significant local fluctuations of the baryon number, strangeness, and electric charge densities about zero, perturbatively corresponding to the production of quark/antiquark pairs. These previously ignored local charge fluctuations can permit the study of charge diffusion in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), even at top collider energies. In this paper we present a new model denoted ICCING (Initial Conserved Charges in Nuclear Geometry) which can reconstruct the initial conditions of conserved charges in the QGP by sampling a (g → qq̅) splitting probability over the initial energy density. We find that the new charge distributions generally differ from the bulk energy density; in particular, the strangeness distribution is significantly more eccentric than standard bulk observables and appears to be associated with the geometry of hot spots in the initial state. The new information provided by these conserved charges opens the door to studying a wealth of new charge- and flavor-dependent correlations in the initial state and ultimately the charge transport parameters of the QGP.