Smoothed particle hydrodynamics for relativistic heavy-ion collisions

A smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method is developed for the study of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. In order to describe the flow of a high-energy but low baryon number density fluid, entropy is taken as the SPH base. The method is formulated in terms of a variational principle, and the SPH equations for an arbitrary curvilinear coordinate system are obtained. Several examples show that SPH is a promising tool for the study of hadronic flow in relativistic heavy-ion processes.