Hydrodynamic Attractors in Ultrarelativistic Nuclear Collisions

Abstract

One of the many physical questions that have emerged from studies of heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC concerns the validity of hydrodynamic modelling at the very early stages, when the Quark-Gluon Plasma system produced is still far from isotropy. In this article we review the idea of far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamic attractors as a way to understand how the complexity of initial states of nuclear matter is reduced so that a hydrodynamic description can be effective.