Adiabatic hydrodynamization: A natural framework to find and describe prehydrodynamic attractors

¹ Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
² CERN, Physics Department, TH Unit, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

^* e-mail: krishna@mit.edu
^* e-mail: bscheihi@mit.edu
^* Speaker at QM23; e-mail: rstein99@mit.edu

Published online: 26 June 2024

Abstract

The adiabatic hydrodynamization framework [1, 2] is a promising framework within which to describe and characterize pre-hydrodynamic attractors in a model-independent fashion. Using this framework, we define a procedure to identify a time-dependent change in coordinates which reveals a dynamical reduction in the number of active degrees of freedom. Applying this procedure to the kinetic theory of a Bjorken-expanding gas of gluons in the small angle elastic scattering limit, we are able to intuitively explain the selfsimilar evolution of the gluon distribution function long before the applicability of hydrodynamics, as well as the loss of memory of its initial condition.