On the hydrodynamic attractor of Yang-Mills plasma

Understand

There is mounting evidence suggesting that relativistic hydrodynamics becomes relevant for the physics of quark-gluon plasma as the result of nonhydrodynamic modes decaying to an attractor apparent even when the system is far from local equilibrium.

• Here we determine this attractor for Bjorken flow in N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory using Borel summation of the gradient expansion of the expectation value of the energy momentum tensor.
• By comparing the result to numerical simulations of the flow based on the AdS/CFT correspondence we show that it provides an accurate and unambiguous approximation of the hydrodynamic attractor in this system.
• This development has important implications for the formulation of effective theories of hydrodynamics.