Lattice Boltzmann study of the one-dimensional boost-invariant expansion with anisotropic initial conditions

Abstract

A numerical algorithm for the implementation of anisotropic distributions in the frame of the relativistic Boltzmann equation is presented. The implementation relies on the expansion of the Romatschke-Strickland distribution with respect to orthogonal polynomials, which is evolved using the lattice Boltzmann algorithm. The validation of our proposed scheme is performed in the context of the one-dimensional boost invariant expansion (Bjorken flow) at various values of the ratio $\eta /s$ of the shear viscosity to the entropy density. This study is limited to the case of massless particles obeying Maxwell-Jüttner statistics.

Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures, submitted to the proceedings of the TIM-18 Physics Conference, 24-26 May 2017, Timisoara, Romania. Matches the accepted version