Initial conditions for hydrodynamics from weakly coupled pre-equilibrium evolution

Abstract

We use leading order effective kinetic theory to simulate the pre\nobreakdash-equilibrium evolution of transverse energy and flow perturbations in heavy-ion collisions. We provide a Green function which propagates the initial perturbations of the energy-momentum tensor to a time when hydrodynamics becomes applicable. With this map, the pre-thermal evolution from saturated nuclei to hydrodynamics can be modeled in the framework of weakly coupled QCD.