Hydrodynamic attractors, initial state energy and particle production in relativistic nuclear collisions

Abstract

We exploit the concept of hydrodynamic attractors to establish a general relation between the initial state energy and the produced particle multiplicities in high-energy nuclear collisions. When combined with an ab initio model of energy deposition, the entropy production during the pre-equilibrium phase naturally explains the universal centrality dependence of the measured charged particle yields in nucleus-nucleus collisions. We further estimate the energy density of the far-from-equilibrium initial state and discuss how our results can be used to constrain non-equilibrium properties of the quark-gluon plasma.

Publication
Phys. Rev. Lett. 123

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