Full 3+1 dimensional simulation of the relativistic Boltzmann equation

Grunow, Ernst William

Full 3+1 dimensional simulation of the relativistic Boltzmann equation

Master Thesis

2021

Abstract

Relativistic hydrodynamics has been the tool of choice to simulate the dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy-ion collisions. Despite the success of hydrodynamics, it has several shortcomings stemming from the fact that it assumes a system close to equilibrium. An alternative to hydrodynamics is solving the Boltzmann equation, which describes the evolution of the full distribution function of the system without the close to equilibrium requirement. Large scale simulations using the Boltzmann equation, however, has hitherto proved computationally intractable due to their computational expense. By using a novel algorithm, and leveraging the computational power of graphical processor units, we numerically integrate the Boltzmann equation in the relaxation time approximation.

Keywords

physics

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