Foundation of Hydrodynamics for Systems with Strong Interactions

Abstract

For a dense and strongly interacting system, such as a nucleus or a strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma, the foundation of hydrodynamics can be better found in the quantum description of constituents moving in the strong mean fields generated by all other particles. Using the result that the Schroedinger equation and the Klein-Gordon equation can be written in hydrodynamical forms, we find that the probability currents of the many-body system in the mean-field description obey a hydrodynamical equation with stress tensors arising from many contributions: quantum effects, mean-field interactions, and thermal fluctuations. The influence of various contributions to the hydrodynamical motion is expected to vary with the temperature, as the quantum and mean-field stress tensors playing more important roles at low and moderate temperatures.