High-energy dileptons from an anisotropic quark-gluon plasma

We calculate leading-order dilepton yields from a quark-gluon plasma which has a time-dependent anisotropy in momentum space. Such anisotropies can arise during the earliest stages of quark-gluon plasma evolution due to the rapid longitudinal expansion of the created matter. A phenomenological model for the proper time dependence of the parton hard momentum scale, p_hard, and the plasma anisotropy parameter, xi, is proposed. The model describes the transition of the plasma from a 0+1 dimensional collisionally-broadened expansion at early times to a 0+1 dimensional ideal hydrodynamic expansion at late times. We find that high-energy dilepton production is enhanced by pre-equilibrium emission up to 50% at LHC energies, if one assumes an isotropization/thermalization time of 2 fm/c. Given sufficiently precise experimental data this enhancement could be used to determine the plasma isotropization time experimentally.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, talk given at the 4th international workshop on High-pT Physics at the LHC 09, February 4-7 2009, Prague, Czech Republic. Accepted to the proceedings of 4th international workshop High-pT physics at LHC 0

Measuring Quark-Gluon-Plasma Thermalization Time with Dileptons

We calculate the medium dilepton yield from a quark-gluon plasma which has a time-dependent local momentum-space anisotropy. A phenomenological model for the hard momentum scale, p_hard(tau), and plasma anisotropy parameter, xi(tau), is constructed which interpolates between free streaming behavior at early times (tau > tau_iso). We show that high-energy dilepton production is sensitive to the assumed plasma isotropization time, tau_iso, and can therefore be used to experimentally determine the time of onset for hydrodynamic expansion of a quark-gluon plasma and the magnitude of expected early-time momentum-space anisotropies.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures; v3: update to match published versio

Fluid dynamic propagation of initial baryon number perturbations on a Bjorken flow background

Baryon number density perturbations offer a possible route to experimentally measure baryon number susceptibilities and heat conductivity of the quark gluon plasma. We study the fluid dynamical evolution of local and event-by-event fluctuations of baryon number density, flow velocity and energy density on top of a (generalized) Bjorken expansion. To that end we use a background-fluctuation splitting and a Bessel-Fourier decomposition for the fluctuating part of the fluid dynamical fields with respect to the azimuthal angle, the radius in the transverse plane and rapidity. We examine how the time evolution of linear perturbations depends on the equation of state as well as on shear viscosity, bulk viscosity and heat conductivity for modes with different azimuthal, radial and rapidity wave numbers. Finally we discuss how this information is accessible to experiments in terms of the transverse and rapidity dependence of correlation functions for baryonic particles in high energy nuclear collisions.Comment: 36 pages, 11 figures; v3: change in the format of the latex file. Minor changes in the text. Typos corrected and updated references. Tweak in Fig. 1-11. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Boost-Invariant (2+1)-dimensional Anisotropic Hydrodynamics

We present results of the application of the anisotropic hydrodynamics (aHydro) framework to (2+1)-dimensional boost invariant systems. The necessary aHydro dynamical equations are derived by taking moments of the Boltzmann equation using a momentum-space anisotropic one-particle distribution function. We present a derivation of the necessary equations and then proceed to numerical solutions of the resulting partial differential equations using both realistic smooth Glauber initial conditions and fluctuating Monte-Carlo Glauber initial conditions. For this purpose we have developed two numerical implementations: one which is based on straightforward integration of the resulting partial differential equations supplemented by a two-dimensional weighted Lax-Friedrichs smoothing in the case of fluctuating initial conditions; and another that is based on the application of the Kurganov-Tadmor central scheme. For our final results we compute the collective flow of the matter via the lab-frame energy-momentum tensor eccentricity as a function of the assumed shear viscosity to entropy ratio, proper time, and impact parameter.Comment: 45 pages, 12 figures; v2 published versio

Constraining the onset of viscous hydrodynamics

We derive two general criteria that can be used to constrain the initial time of the onset of 2nd-order conformal viscous hydrodynamics in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. We show this explicitly for 0+1 dimensional viscous hydrodynamics and discuss how to extend the constraint to higher dimensions.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figures - To appear in the conference proceedings for Quark Matter 2009, March 30 - April 4, Knoxville, Tennessee. Selected Poster for the Flash Talk Session at QM09. v3: typos corrected, minor format changes and updated reference