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We present a systematic study of $\Lambda$ hyperon's polarization observables using event-by-event (3+1)D relativistic hydrodynamics. The effects of initial hot spot size and QGP's specific shear viscosity on the polarization observables are quantified. We examine the effects of the two formulations of the thermal shear tensor on the polarization observables using the same hydrodynamic background. With event-by-event simulations, we make predictions for the Fourier coefficients of $\Lambda$'s longitudinal polarization $P^z$ with respect to the event planes of different orders of anisotropic flow. We propose new correlations among the Fourier coefficients of $P^z$ and charged hadron anisotropic flow coefficients to further test the mapping from fluid velocity gradients to hyperon's polarization. Finally, we present a system size scan with Au+Au, Ru+Ru, and O+O collisions at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}} = 200$ GeV to study the system size dependence of polarization observables at the Relativistic Heavy-ion Collider., Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures

We systematically study the hyperon global polarization's sensitivity to the collision systems' initial longitudinal flow velocity in hydrodynamic simulations. By explicitly imposing local energy-momentum conservation when mapping the initial collision geometry to macroscopic hydrodynamic fields, we study the evolution of systems' orbital angular momentum (OAM) and fluid vorticity. We find that a simultaneous description of the $\Lambda$ hyperons' global polarization and the slope of pion's directed flow can strongly constrain the size of longitudinal flow at the beginning of hydrodynamic evolution. We extract the size of the initial longitudinal flow and the fraction of orbital angular momentum in the produced QGP fluid as a function of collision energy with the STAR measurements in the RHIC Beam Energy Scan program. We find that there is about 100-200 $\hbar$ OAM that remains in the mid-rapidity fluid at the beginning of hydrodynamic evolution. We further exam the effects of different hydrodynamic gradients on the spin polarization of $\Lambda$ and $\bar{\Lambda}$. The gradients of $\mu_B/T$ can change the ordering between $\Lambda$'s and $\bar{\Lambda}$'s polarization., Comment: update in accordance with the referee report

Microscopic transport approaches are the tool to describe the non-equilibrium evolution in low energy collisions as well as in the late dilute stages of high-energy collisions. Here, a newly developed hadronic transport approach, SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons) is introduced. The overall bulk dynamics in low energy heavy ion collisions is shown including the excitation function of elliptic flow employing several equations of state. The implications of this new approach for dilepton production are discussed and preliminary results for afterburner calculations at the highest RHIC energy are presented and compared to previous UrQMD results. A detailed understanding of a hadron gas with vacuum properties is required to establish the baseline for the exploration of the transition to the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions at high net baryon densities., 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted contribution to the proceedings of Quark Matter 2018

Starting from IP-Glasma initial conditions, we investigate the effects of bulk pressure on low mass dilepton production at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies. Though thermal dilepton $v_2$ is affected by the presence of both bulk and shear viscosity, whether or not these effects can be measured depends on the dilepton "cocktail" contribution to the the low mass dilepton $v_2$. Combining the thermal and "cocktail" dileptons, the effects of bulk viscosity on total dilepton $v_2$ is investigated., Comment: Proceedings for the 26th International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter 2017), February 5-11 2017, Chicago, Illinois, USA

We present a model of the dynamical evolution of relativistic heavy ion collisions, which combines second-order viscous hydrodynamics and microscopic transport. In particular, we present a hybrid approach with MUSIC hydrodynamics, and SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons) afterburner. In this work, we focus on low- p T hadronic observables—identified hadron p T spectra and anisotropic flow coefficients. We also demonstrate how the hadronic chemistry is altered by the hadronic non-equilibrium dynamics, for example by baryon-antibaryon annihilation. The new MUSIC + SMASH hybrid approach is also compared to existing MUSIC + UrQMD results.

The changing shape of the rapidity spectrum of net protons over the SPS energy range is still lacking theoretical understanding. In this work, a model for string excitation and string fragmentation is implemented for the description of high energy collisions within a hadronic transport approach. The free parameters of the string model are tuned to reproduce the experimentally measured particle production in proton-proton collisions. With the fixed parameters we advance to calculations for heavy ion collisions, where the shape of the proton rapidity spectrum changes from a single peak to a double peak structure with increasing beam energy in the experiment. We present calculations of proton rapidity spectra at different SPS energies in heavy ion collisions. Qualitatively, a good agreement with the experimental findings is obtained. In a future work, the formation process of string fragments will be studied in detail aiming to quantitatively reproduce the measurement.

Viscous relativistic hydrodynamics in 3+1 dimensions is applied to describe heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC. We present calculations of observables that are sensitive to the longitudinal structure of the created system. In particular we present pseudo-rapidity correlations and demonstrate their dependence on both the initial state and short range correlations introduced via a microscopic transport description. We further demonstrate the effect of a varying temperature dependence of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio on rapidity dependent flow harmonics., 4 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the Quark Matter 2015 conference, September 27 - October 3, 2015, Kobe, Japan

The stopping of baryons in heavy ion collisions at beam momenta of $p_{\rm lab} = 20-160A$ GeV is lacking a quantitative description within theoretical calculations. Heavy ion reactions at these energies are experimentally explored at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and will be studied at future facilities such as FAIR and NICA. Since the net baryon density is determined by the amount of stopping, this is the pre-requisiste for any investigation of other observables related to structures in the QCD phase diagram such as a first-order phase transition or a critical endpoint. In this work we employ a string model for treating hadron-hadron interactions within a hadronic transport approach (SMASH, Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons). Free parameters of the string excitation and decay are tuned to match experimental measurements in elementary proton-proton collisions, where some mismatch in the $x_F$ distribution of protons is still present. Afterwards, the model is applied to heavy ion collisions, where the experimentally observed change of the shape of the proton rapidity spectrum from a single peak structure to a double peak structure with increasing beam energy is reproduced. Heavy ion collisions provide the opportunity to study the formation process of string fragments in terms of formation times and reduced interaction cross-sections for pre-formed hadrons. A good agreement with the measured rapidity spectra of protons and pions is achieved while insights on the fragmentation process are obtained. In the future, the presented approach can be used to create event-by-event initial conditions for hybrid calculations., Comment: As accepted in Journal of Physics G, added a subsection on the multi-parameter problem and minor changes. J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys (2020)

Approaches based on viscous hydrodynamics for the hot and dense stage and hadronic transport for the final dilute rescattering stage are successfully applied to the dynamic description of heavy ion reactions at high beam energies. One crucial step in such hybrid approaches is the so called particlization, the transition between the hydrodynamic description to microscopic degrees of freedom. For this purpose, individual particles are sampled on the Cooper-Frye hypersurface. In this work, 4 different realizations of sampling algorithms are compared, where three of them incorporate global conservation laws of quantum numbers in each event. The algorithms are compared within two types of scenarios: simple "box" hypersurface consisting of only one static cell and a typical particlization hypersurface for Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_\mathrm{NN}} = 200$ GeV. For all algorithms the mean multiplicities (or particle spectra) remain unaffected by global conservation laws in the case of large volumes. In contrast, the fluctuations of the particle numbers are affected considerably. The fluctuations of the newly developed SPREW algorithm based on exponential weights and the recently suggested SER algorithm based on ensemble rejection are smaller than without conservation laws and agree with the expectation from the canonical ensemble. The previously applied mode sampling algorithm produces dramatically larger fluctuations, than it is expected in the corresponding microcanonical ensemble, and therefore should be avoided in fluctuation studies. This study might be of interest for investigations of particle fluctuations and correlations, e.g. the suggested signatures for a phase transition or a critical endpoint, in hybrid approaches that are affected by global conservation laws., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, version accepted to publication in Journal of Physics G

We investigate the consequences of a nonzero bulk viscosity coefficient on the transverse momentum spectra, azimuthal momentum anisotropy, and multiplicity of charged hadrons produced in heavy ion collisions at LHC energies. The agreement between a realistic 3D hybrid simulation and the experimentally measured data considerably improves with the addition of a bulk viscosity coefficient for strongly interacting matter. This paves the way for an eventual quantitative determination of several QCD transport coefficients from the experimental heavy ion and hadron-nucleus collision programs., 5 pages, 3 figures. Light modifications to text and figures. To be published in PRL

As RHIC is entering the precision measurement era and the LHC is producing a copious amount of new data, the role of 3+1D event-by-event viscous hydrodynamics is more important than ever to understand the bulk data as well as providing the background for hard probes. For more meaningful comparison with the experimental data, it is also important that hydrodynamics be coupled to the hadronic afterburner. In this proceeding we report on preliminary results of coupling MUSIC with UrQMD., 4 pages, 6 figures in pdf. Submitted to the proceedings of the Quark Matter 2012 conference (August 13-18, 2012, Washington D.C.)