Evidence for universal flow and characteristics of early time thermalization in a scalar field model for heavy ion collisions

Abstract

We study numerically the evolution of an expanding strongly self-coupled real scalar field. We use a conformally invariant action that gives a traceless energy-momentum tensor and is better suited to model the early time behavior of a system such as QCD, whose action is also conformally invariant. We consider asymmetric initial conditions and observe that when the system is initialized with nonzero spatial eccentricity, the eccentricity decreases and the elliptic flow coefficient increases. This behavior is characteristic of a hydrodynamic system in which pressure gradients are converted into fluid velocities, and therefore spatial anisotropy decreases while momentum anisotropy is generated. We look at a measure of transverse pressure asymmetry that has been shown to behave similarly to the elliptic flow coefficient in hydrodynamic systems and show that in our system their behavior is strikingly similar. We show that the derivative of the transverse velocity is proportional to the gradient of the energy in Milne coordinates and argue that this result means that transverse velocity initially develops in the same way that it does in hydrodynamic systems. We conclude that some aspects of the early onset of hydrodynamic behavior that has been observed in quark-gluon plasmas are seen in our numerical simulation of strongly coupled scalar fields. Published by the American Physical Society 2024