Speaker
Description
To study the microscopic structure of quark-gluon plasma, data from hadronic collisions must be confronted with models that go beyond fluid dynamics. Here, I describe a study of a kinetic theory model that encompasses fluid dynamics but contains also particle-like excitations in a boost invariant setting with no symmetries in the transverse plane. The kinetic theory results are compared to data on azimuthal flow coefficients over a wide centrality range in PbPb collisions at the LHC, in AuAu collisions at RHIC, and in pPb collisions at the LHC. By comparing kinetic transport to viscous fluid dynamics we find that non-hydrodynamic excitations make the dominant contribution to collective flow signals in pPb collisions at the LHC and contribute significantly to flow in peripheral nucleus-nucleus collisions, while fluid-like excitations dominate collectivity in central nucleus-nucleus collisions at collider energies.
