English

Non-conformal attractor in boost-invariant plasmas

Nuclear Theory 2021-12-08 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Plasma Physics

Abstract

We study the dissipative evolution of (0+1)-dimensionally expanding media with Bjorken symmetry using the Boltzmann equation for massive particles in relaxation-time approximation. Breaking conformal symmetry by a mass induces a non-zero bulk viscous pressure in the medium. It is shown that even a small mass (in units of the local temperature) drastically modifies the well-known attractor for the shear Reynolds number previously observed in massless systems. For generic nonzero particle mass, neither the shear nor the bulk viscous pressure relax quickly to a non-equilibrium attractor; they approach the hydrodynamic limit only late, at small values of the inverse Reynolds numbers. Only the longitudinal pressure, which is a combination of thermal, shear and bulk viscous pressures, continues to show early approach to a far-off-equilibrium attractor, driven by the rapid longitudinal expansion at early times. Second-order dissipative hydrodynamics based on a gradient expansion around locally isotropic thermal equilibrium fails to reproduce this attractor.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.05500,
  title  = {Non-conformal attractor in boost-invariant plasmas},
  author = {Chandrodoy Chattopadhyay and Sunil Jaiswal and Lipei Du and Ulrich Heinz and Subrata Pal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.05500},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:06:37.889Z