Space-time evolution of bulk QCD matter

We introduce a combined, fully three-dimensional macroscopic/microscopic transport approach employing relativistic 3D hydrodynamics for the early, dense, deconfined stage of the reaction and a microscopic nonequilibrium model for the later hadronic stage where the equilibrium assumptions are no longer valid. Within this approach, we study the dynamics of hot bulk QCD matter, which is being created in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at the BNL Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. Our work is an extension of the well-known hybrid macro+micro approach in 1+1 and 2+1 dimensions, which is capable of self-consistently calculating the freeze-out of the hadronic system while accounting for the collective flow on the hadronization hypersurface generated by the quark-gluon plasma expansion. In particular, we perform a detailed analysis of the reaction dynamics, hadronic freeze-out, and transverse flow.