Journal Article

Relativistic viscous hydrodynamics for heavy-ion collisions with ECHO-QGP

Becattini, F., Inghirami, G., Beraudo, A., Pagliara, G., Del Zanna, L., Chandra, V., Rolando, V., De Pace, A., Drago, A.

2013

Overview

We present ECHO-QGP, a numerical code for (3+1)-dimensional relativistic viscous hydrodynamics designed for the modeling of the space-time evolution of the matter created in high-energy nuclear collisions. The code has been built on top of the Eulerian Conservative High-Order astrophysical code for general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics (Del Zanna et al. in Astron. Astrophys. 473:11, 2007 ] and here it has been upgraded to handle the physics of the Quark–Gluon Plasma. ECHO-QGP features second-order treatment of causal relativistic viscosity effects both in Minkowskian and in Bjorken coordinates; partial or complete chemical equilibrium of hadronic species before kinetic freeze-out; initial conditions based on the Glauber model, including a Monte-Carlo routine for event-by-event fluctuating initial conditions; a freeze-out procedure based on the Cooper–Frye prescription. The code is extensively validated against several test problems and results always appear accurate, as guaranteed by the combination of the conservative (shock-capturing) approach and the high-order methods employed. ECHO-QGP can be extended to include evolution of the electromagnetic fields coupled to the plasma.

• Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg,Springer,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Astronomy / Astrophysics and Cosmology / Collisions / Collisions (Nuclear physics) / Computational fluid dynamics / Electromagnetic fields / Elementary Particles / Evolution / Fluid dynamics / Fluid flow / Hadrons / Heavy Ions / Hydrodynamics / Initial conditions / Mathematical models / Measurement Science and Instrumentation / Nuclear Energy / Nuclear Physics / Physics / Physics and Astronomy / Quantum Field Theories / Quantum Field Theory / Regular Article - Theoretical Physics / String Theory