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 review 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.

Comments: References added and typos corrected, corresponds to the published version, 22 pages, 14 figures