Hydrodynamics and collective behaviour in relativistic nuclear collisions

Hydrodynamics is applied to describe the dynamics of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The focus of the present study is the influence of a possible (phase) transition to the quark-gluon plasma in the nuclear matter equation of state on collective observables, such as the lifetime of the system and the transverse directed flow of matter. It is shown that such a transition leads to a softening of the equation of state, and consequently to a time-delayed expansion which is in principle observable via two-particle correlation functions. Moreover, the delayed expansion leads to a local minimum in the excitation function of transverse directed flow around AGS energies. (orig.)