Integrated dynamical approach to relativistic heavy ion collisions

We review integrated dynamical approaches to describe heavy ion reaction as a whole at ultrarelativistic energies. Since final observables result from all the history of the reaction, it is important to describe all the stages of the reaction to obtain the properties of the quark-gluon plasma from experimental data. As an example of these approaches, we develop an integrated dynamical model, which is composed of a fully (3 + 1) dimensional ideal hydrodynamic model with a state-of-the-art equation of state based on lattice QCD, and subsequent hadronic cascade in the late stage. Initial conditions are obtained employing Monte Carlo versions of the Kharzeev-Levin-Nardi model (MC-KLN) or the Glauber model (MC-Glauber). Using this integrated model, we first simulate relativistic heavy ion collisions at the RHIC and LHC energies starting from conventional smooth initial conditions. We next utilise each Monte Carlo sample of initial conditions on an event-by-event basis and perform event-by-event dynamical simulations to accumulate a large number of minimum bias events. A special attention is paid to performing the flow analysis as in experiments towards consistent comparison of theoretical results with experimental data. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.