We review several facets of the hydrodynamic description of the relativistic heavy ion collisions, starting from the historical motivation to the present understandings of the observed collective aspects of experimental data, especially those of the
most recent RHIC and LHC results. In this report, we particularly focus on the conceptual questions and the physical foundations of the validity of the hydrodynamic approach itself. We also discuss recent efforts to clarify some of the points in this direction, such as the various forms of derivations of relativistic hydrodynamics together with the limitations intrinsic to the traditional approaches, variational approaches, known analytic solutions for special cases, and several new theoretical developments. Throughout this review, we stress the role of course-graining procedure in the hydrodynamic description and discuss its relation to the physical observables through the analysis of a hydrodynamic mapping of a microscopic transport model. Several questions to be answered to clarify the physics of collective phenomena in the relativistic heavy ion collisions are pointed out.
We give a pedagogical introduction of the stochastic variational method and show that this generalized variational principle describes classical and quantum mechanics in a unified way.
Starting from the linear sigma model with constituent quarks we derive the chiral fluid dynamics where hydrodynamic equations for the quark fluid are coupled to the equation of motion for the order-parameter field. In a static system at thermal equil
ibrium this model leads to a chiral phase transition which, depending on the choice of the quark-meson coupling constant, could be a crossover or a first order one. We investigate the stability of the chiral fluid in the static and expanding backgrounds by considering the evolution of perturbations with respect to the mean-field solution. In the static background the spectrum of plane-wave perturbations consists of two branches, one corresponding to the sound waves and another to the sigma-meson excitations. For large couplings these two branches cross and the excitation spectrum acquires exponentially growing modes. The stability analysis is also done for the Bjorken-like background solution by explicitly solving the time-dependent differential equation for perturbations in the eta-space. In this case the growth rate of unstable modes is significantly reduced.
We discuss the nonrelativistic limit of the relativistic Navier-Fourier-Stokes (NFS) theory. The next-to-leading order relativistic corrections to the NFS theory for the Landau-Lifshitz fluid are obtained. While the lowest order truncation of the vel
ocity expansion leads to the usual NFS equations of nonrelativistic fluids, we show that when the next-to-leading order relativistic corrections are included, the equations can be expressed concurrently with two different fluid velocities. One of the fluid velocities is parallel to the conserved charge current (which follows the Eckart definition) and the other one is parallel to the energy current (which follows the Landau-Lifshitz definition). We compare this next-to-leading order relativistic hydrodynamics with bivelocity hydrodynamics, which is one of the generalizations of the NFS theory and is formulated in such a way to include the usual mass velocity and also a new velocity, called the volume velocity. We find that the volume velocity can be identified with the velocity obtained in the Landau-Lifshitz definition. Then, the structure of bivelocity hydrodynamics, which is derived using various nontrivial assumptions, is reproduced in the NFS theory including the next-to-leading order relativistic corrections.
The microscopic formulas for the shear viscosity $eta$, the bulk viscosity $zeta$, and the corresponding relaxation times $tau_pi$ and $tau_Pi$ of causal dissipative relativistic fluid-dynamics are obtained at finite temperature and chemical potentia
l by using the projection operator method. The non-triviality of the finite chemical potential calculation is attributed to the arbitrariness of the operator definition for the bulk viscous pressure.We show that, when the operator definition for the bulk viscous pressure $Pi$ is appropriately chosen, the leading-order result of the ratio, $zeta$ over $tau_Pi$, coincides with the same ratio obtained at vanishing chemical potential. We further discuss the physical meaning of the time-convolutionless (TCL) approximation to the memory function, which is adopted to derive the main formulas. We show that the TCL approximation violates the time reversal symmetry appropriately and leads results consistent with the quantum master equation obtained by van Hove. Furthermore, this approximation can reproduce an exact relation for transport coefficients obtained by using the f-sum rule derived by Kadanoff and Martin. Our approach can reproduce also the result in Baier et al.(2008) Ref. cite{con} by taking into account the next-order correction to the TCL approximation, although this correction causes several problems.
The microscopic formulae of the bulk viscosity $zeta $ and the corresponding relaxation time $tau_{Pi}$ in causal dissipative relativistic fluid dynamics are derived by using the projection operator method. In applying these formulae to the pionic fl
uid, we find that the renormalizable energy-momentum tensor should be employed to obtain consistent results. In the leading order approximation in the chiral perturbation theory, the relaxation time is enhanced near the QCD phase transition and $tau_{Pi}$ and $zeta $ are related as $tau_{Pi}=zeta /[beta {(1/3-c_{s}^{2})(epsilon +P)-2(epsilon -3P)/9}]$, where $epsilon $, $P$ and $c_{s}$ are the energy density, pressure and velocity of sound, respectively. The predicted $zeta $ and $% tau_{Pi}$ should satisfy the so-called causality condition. We compare our result with the results of the kinetic calculation by Israel and Stewart and the string theory, and confirm that all the three approaches are consistent with the causality condition.
We show that relativistic fluids behave as non-Newtonian fluids. First, we discuss the problem of acausal propagation in the diffusion equation and introduce the modified Maxwell-Cattaneo-Vernotte (MCV) equation. By using the modified MCV equation, w
e obtain the causal dissipative relativistic (CDR) fluid dynamics, where unphysical propagation with infinite velocity does not exist. We further show that the problems of the violation of causality and instability are intimately related, and the relativistic Navier-Stokes equation is inadequate as the theory of relativistic fluids. Finally, the new microscopic formula to calculate the transport coefficients of the CDR fluid dynamics is discussed. The result of the microscopic formula is consistent with that of the Boltzmann equation, i.e., Grads moment method.
The transport coefficients of causal relativistic dissipative fluid dynamics are calculated both in a field-theoretical and a kinetic approach. We find that the results from the traditional kinetic calculation by Israel and Stewart are modified. The
new expressions for the viscous transport coefficients agree with the results obtained in the field-theoretical approach when the contributions from pair creation and annihilation are neglected.
We investigate the quark spectrum in the quark-gluon plasma phase near color superconducting (CS) and chiral phase transitions. Owing to the precursory soft modes of the phase transitions, there appear novel excitaion spectra: In the CS transition, t
he quark matter shows non-Fermi liquid behavior and leads to the pseudogap in the density of states of quarks. In the chiral transition, three collective excitations appear in the quark spectrum.
