Abstract
We investigate ideal hydrodynamic evolution, with Landau initial conditions, both in a semi-analytical 1+1D approach and in a numerical code incorporating event-by-event variation with many events and transverse density inhomogeneities. The object of the calculation is to test how fast would a Landau initial condition transition to a commonly used boost-invariant expansion. We show that the transition to boost-invariant flow occurs too late for realistic setups, with corrections of O (20 - 30%) expected at freezeout for most scenarios. Moreover, the deviation from boost-invariance is correlated with both transverse flow and elliptic flow, with the more highly transversely flowing regions also showing the most violation of boost invariance. Therefore, if longitudinal flow is not fully developed at the early stages of heavy ion collisions, 2+1 dimensional hydrodynamics is inadequate to extract transport coefficients of the quark-gluon plasma. Based on [1, 2]
