Mode-by-mode fluid dynamics for relativistic heavy ion collisions

We propose to study the fluid dynamic propagation of fluctuations in relativistic heavy ion collisions differentially with respect to their azimuthal, radial and longitudinal wavelength. To this end, we introduce a background-fluctuation splitting and a Bessel–Fourier decomposition of the fluctuating modes. We demonstrate how the fluid dynamic evolution of realistic events can be built up from the propagation of individual modes. We describe the main elements of this mode-by-mode fluid dynamics, and we discuss its use in the fluid dynamic analysis of heavy ion collisions. As a first illustration, we quantify to what extent only fluctuations of sufficiently large radial wave length contribute to harmonic flow coefficients. We find that fluctuations of short wave length are suppressed not only due to larger dissipative effects, but also due to a geometrical averaging over the freeze-out hyper-surface. In this way, our study further substantiates the picture that harmonic flow coefficients give access to a coarse-grained version of the initial conditions for heavy ion collisions, only