Modeling the Heavy-Ion Collisions with ECHO-QGP: a novel resource for the study of the QGP

In this Thesis, I present ECHO-QGP: a state of the art resource for 3+1-D hydrodynamic simulation of the QGP created during heavy-ion collisions. It features high accuracy methods for time integration, spatial interpolation and reconstruction routines (which are essential to capture small-scale hydrodynamic phenomena and turbulence) together with the inclusion of second-order treatment of dissipative effects through the evolution of the Israel-Stewart equations for the bulk and shear stress tensor components, coupled to hydrodynamical equations. ECHO-QGP also features a shockcapturing approach, which is essential to treat the discontinuities that invariably arise due to the intrinsic nonlinear nature of the hydrodynamic equations. In this work I show how reliable ECHO-QGP is in the framework of heavy-ion collisions, with the collection of its responses to most of the tests which are known in literature. We exploited ECHO-QGP to study some important features of the QGP: we calculated the vorticity in a gold-gold peripheral collision and the consequent polarization for the final state for Λ baryons. We also studied how the hydrodynamic evolution of the perturbation in the initial state can be treated perturbatively. After four years since the beginning of the project, after several successful tests, after the application for physic studies, ECHO-QGP is being presented to the scientific community as a tool in line with the current state of the art, with the additional feature that it has been designed for public distribution.