Does quark-gluon plasma feature an extended hydrodynamic regime?

We investigate the response of the near-equilibrium quark-gluon plasma (QGP) to perturbation at non-hydrodynamic gradients. We propose a conceivable scenario under which sound mode continues to dominate the medium response in this regime. Such a scenario has been observed experimentally for various liquids and liquid metals. We further show this extended hydrodynamic regime (EHR) indeed exists for both the weakly-coupled kinetic equation in the relaxation time approximation (RTA) and the strongly-coupled ${\cal N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory. We construct a simple but nontrivial extension of M{\"u}eller-Isareal-Stewart (MIS) theory, namely MIS*, and demonstrate that it describes EHR response for both RTA and SYM theory. This indicates that MIS* equations can potentially be employed to search for QGP EHR via heavy-ion collisions.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Initial-state and final-state effects on hadron production in small collision systems

Heavy meson production in reactions with nuclei is an active new frontier to understand QCD dynamics and the process of hadronization in nuclear matter. Measurements in various colliding systems at RHIC and LHC, including Pb-Pb, Xe-Xe, O-O, p-Pb, and p-O, enable precision tests of the medium-size, temperature, and mass dependencies of the in-medium parton propagation and shower formation. We employ a coupled DGLAP evolution framework that takes advantage of splitting functions recently obtained in soft-collinear effective theory with Glauber gluons (SCET$_{\rm G}$) and hard thermal loop (HTL) motivated collisional energy loss effects. With jet quenching effects constrained to the nuclear modification factor of charged hadrons in Pb-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV, we present predictions for light and heavy-meson in Xe-Xe, O-O and p-Pb collisions at the LHC. We find that the nuclear modification scales non-trivially with the quark mass and medium properties. In particular, there can be sizeable collision-induced attenuation of heavy mesons in small systems such as oxygen-oxygen and high-multiplicity p-Pb events. Finally, we analyze the impact of different models of initial-state parton dynamics on the search for QGP signatures in small colliding systems.Comment: Quark Matter 2023 Proceedings; 4 pages, 3 figure