Recent progress in anisotropic hydrodynamics

Abstract

The quark-gluon plasma created in a relativistic heavy-ion collisions possesses a sizable pressure anisotropy in the local rest frame at very early times after the initial nuclear impact and this anisotropy only slowly relaxes as the system evolves. In a kinetic theory picture, this translates into the existence of sizable momentum-space anisotropies in the underlying partonic distribution functions, <p_L^2> << <p_T^2>. In such cases, it is better to reorganize the hydrodynamical expansion by taking into account momentum-space anisotropies at leading-order in the expansion instead of as a perturbative correction to an isotropic distribution. The resulting anisotropic hydrodynamics framework has been shown to more accurately describe the dynamics of rapidly expanding systems such as the quark-gluon plasma. In this proceedings contribution, I review the basic ideas of anisotropic hydrodynamics, recent progress, and present a few preliminary phenomenological predictions for identified particle spectra and elliptic flow.