Toshali Mitra: Hydrodynamic attractors – Fluid dynamics far from equilibrium

The emergence of hydrodynamic attractors has provided a successful framework for understanding the hydrodynamic evolution in strongly interacting systems far from equilibrium. Hydrodynamic attractors studied in the context of high-energy nuclear collisions, explains the fluid-like dynamics of the monotonically expanding quark-gluon plasma formed in such collisions. Recently, hydrodynamics attractors have been studied theoretically in ultracold quantum gases with time-dependent modulation of the scattering length, opening new avenues for their experimental realization. In this talk, I will introduce the concept hydrodynamic attractors and discuss their applications to strongly interacting systems. In particular, I will discuss cyclic attractors in systems undergoing oscillatory expansion and contraction. I will also discuss how spontaneous symmetry breaking modifies the behaviour of attractors in monotonically expanding systems- driving the evolution towards fixed points determined by the system’s parameters at late time.