The evolution of tubular structures in a viscous quark gluon plasma

Abstract

We study the radial expansion of cylindrical tubes in a hot QGP described by the equation of state of the MIT bag model. These tubes are treated as perturbations in the energy density of the system which is formed in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC. We start from the equations of viscous relativistic hydrodynamics in two spatial dimensions with cylindrical symmetry and perform an expansion of these equations in a small parameter, conserving the nonlinearity of the hydrodynamical formalism. The relativistic viscous fluid is studied with a relativistic NavierStokes equation and the perturbations are governed by the Burgers equation. We estimate the typical expansion time of the tubes.