Including off-diagonal anisotropies in anisotropic hydrodynamics

Abstract

In this paper we present a method for efficiently including the effects of off-diagonal local rest frame momentum anisotropies in leading-order anisotropic hydrodynamics. The method relies on diagonalization of the space-like block of the anisotropy tensor and allows one to reduce the necessary moments of the distribution function in the off-diagonal case to a linear combination of diagonal-anisotropy integrals. Once reduced to diagonal-anisotropy integrals, the results can be computed efficiently using techniques described previously in the literature. We present a general framework for how to accomplish this and provide examples for off-diagonal anisotropy moments entering into the energy-momentum tensor and viscous update equations which emerge when performing anisotropic pressure matching.