Speaker
Description
Over the past decade, relativistic hydrodynamics has been pushed into increasingly extreme regimes—from hydrodynamic attractors in theory to small-system dynamics at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and Large Hadron Collider. Yet these approaches ultimately remain anchored to local thermal equilibrium. In this talk, based on 2504.18754 with Berges, Denicol, and Preis, I present a fundamentally different framework: a hydrodynamic description defined entirely far from equilibrium, using nonthermal fixed points as the reference state. I discuss implications for fluid classification via shear viscosity, early-time dynamics in high-energy nuclear collisions—where nonthermal fixed points emerge as attractors—and cold atomic gases, where they are realized experimentally.