Speaker
Description
Attractors are a generic feature of far-from-equilibrium systems in which much of the memory of a system’s initial condition is lost long before local thermal equilibration. There has been recent interest in leveraging the existence of attractors to extend hydrodynamic descriptions to earlier times in the formation of QGP, largely focused on isotropic attractors. However, highly anisotropic non-thermal attractors are present in QCD kinetic theory at early times, motivating developing approaches more similar to anisotropic hydrodynamics (aHydro). In this talk, we propose “attractodynamics”: a hydrodynamic-like effective theory of excitations about a generic far-from-equilibrium anisotropic attractor. Unlike aHydro, here the underlying generalized Romatschke-Strickland distribution function is an attractor rather than phenomenologically chosen, allowing greater theoretical control. We present the attractodynamic framework and derive attractodynamic equations of motion for a simple 0+1D theory with a known analytic attractor solution.