Date of Award
January 2015
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Physics & Astronomy
First Advisor
Denes Molnar
Committee Member 1
Andrew Hirsch
Committee Member 2
Martin Kruczenski
Committee Member 3
Wei Xie
Abstract
The most widely used theoretical framework to model the early stages of a heavy-ion collision is viscous hydrodynamics. Comparing hydrodynamic simulations to heavy-ion data inevitably requires the conversion of the fluid to particles. This conversion, typically done in the Cooper-Frye formalism, is ambiguous for viscous fluids. In this thesis work, self-consistent phase space corrections are calculated by solving the linearized Boltzmann equation. These species-dependent solutions are contrasted with those obtained using the ad-hoc ``democratic Grad'' ansatz typically employed in the literature in which coefficients are independent of particle dynamics. Solutions are calculated analytically for a massless gas and numerically for the general case of a hadron resonance gas. For example, it is found that for a gas of massless particles interacting via isotropic, energy-independent 2 to 2 scatterings, the shear viscous corrections variationally prefer a momentum dependence close to p^3/2 rather than the quadratic dependence assumed in the Grad ansatz.
Recommended Citation
Wolff, Zachary, "Self-Consistent Conversion of a Viscous Fluid to Particles and Heavy-Ion Applications" (2015). Open Access Dissertations. 1436.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/1436