Ohio State is in the process of revising websites and program materials to accurately reflect compliance with the law. While this work occurs, language referencing protected class status or other activities prohibited by Ohio Senate Bill 1 may still appear in some places. However, all programs and activities are being administered in compliance with federal and state law.

Nuclear Physics Seminar - Mike Strickland (Kent State University) - "Anisotrophic Hydrodynamics"

Rippled, rainbow, technicolor graphic
March 7, 2013
10:00 am - 11:00 am
4138 Physics Research Building

One of the chief limitations of viscous hydrodynamical models are that they make an implicit assumption that the system under consideration is close to being thermal and isotropic in momentum space. However, there are many situations in which this may not be the case. In particular, this assumption fails in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at early times due to the rapid longitudinal expansion of the system. It also fails near the "cold" edges of the interaction region where the system is better approximated by a free streaming gas. I will present a new method to derive hydro-like dynamical equations which does not rely on the assumption that the system is close to being isotropic in momentum space. The resulting partial differential equations can equally well describe the ideal hydrodynamical limit, the free streaming limit, and anything in between. In addition, they can be shown to reduce to the 2nd order viscous hydrodynamical equations in the limit that the system is close to being isotropic in momentum space.

Finally, I will present results of the numerical solution of these equations in order to quantitatively describe the collective flow of matter created in heavy ion collisions.