HYDRODYNAMICS AT RHIC AND LHC: WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

Abstract

Fluid dynamical description of elementary particle collisions has a long history dating back to the works of Landau and Fermi. Nevertheless, it is during the last 10–15 years when fluid dynamics has become the standard tool to describe the evolution of matter created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. In this paper, I briefly describe the hydrodynamical models, what we have learned when analyzing the RHIC and LHC data using these models, and what the latest developments and challenges are.