Hydrodynamics in high-energy nuclear collisions

Abstract

This thesis is a review of six publications in which we make use of relativistic hydrodynamics to solve the evolution of matter produced in extremely energetic nucleus-nucleus collisions. In the first one of these papers we study the thermodynamics, the hydrodynamics and the decoupling conditions of such matter. We discuss the initial conditions for the flow, the hydrodynamic equations for the transverse expansion of matter assuming cylindrical symmetry and longitudinal boost invariance and finally present a numeric algorithm, which we use to integrate these equations. In the subsequent three papers this framework is utilized to calculate the transverse momentum spectra of hadrons, the dilepton production and the abundance of strange particles in the final state. The bag model equation of state is used to simulate the first-order phase transition between baryonless hadronic matter and quark-gluon plasma. In the fifth paper we include the particle production from decaying color electric field according to the flux tube model for heavy ion collisions. The hadronization is incorporated by introducing an equilibrium 'mixed state' of hadrons gas, plasma and the color field in analogy to the mixed phase described by the ordinary bag model equation of state. In the last paper I apply a 1+2 dimensional numeric code to analyze a 1+3 dimensional cylindrically symmetric flow of matter assumed to be formed in a central O+Pb collision at 200 GeV / nucleon. The flow data is used to calculate the pseudorapidity distribution of transverse energy for the produced pions.