Fluid Dynamical Modeling of High-Energy Collisions: Interplay between Theory and Phenomenology

by Dr Dekrayat Almaalol (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Tuesday 16 Apr 2024, 15:30 → 17:30 US/Eastern

Large Seminar Room

The little bangs created in high energy particle colliders reproduce the extreme conditions of the early universe at a few microseconds after the big bang. Relativistic heavy ion collisions is, therefore, the only lab setup where droplets of the strongly interacting matter of quantum chromodynamics, the quark gluon plasma “QGP” can be produced and studied. Due to its short lifetime and small size, the main goal of the program is to study the thermodynamics and dynamical properties of the transient state of QGP by inferring its final momentum distributions. Since the beginning of heavy ion collision experiments, and with the wealth of data, the available beam energies, and the advanced detectors, our field has reached a precision era in heavy ion collisions measurements. One of the most fascinating discoveries made via these measurements is that the extremely hot and dense QGP state of matter is a liquid. This collective behavior has been observed in the experimental data and confirmed by the phenomenological success of hydrodynamics models to describe the data. This success has been invested into precision measurements to extract the microscopic transport properties of the QGP such as its shear and bulk viscosities as well as ongoing efforts to make quantitative measurements of quantum phenomena such as spin and polarization. In this talk, I will discuss the phenomenological success of hydrodynamics models and summarize what we learned from data-to-model comparisons. I will discuss the interplay between theory and phenomenology and how this affects our current understanding of the QGP. In particular, I would like to discuss the current tools to understand the regime of applicability of dissipative hydrodynamics and highlight areas where improvements are needed for the hydrodynamical modeling of the simulations and where the theory assumptions need further careful consideration.

Zoom link:  https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1605020278?pwd=cHJ1bDRuK1FDNnZLSnpxVkZhcDQ3QT09 

Colloquium recording