The success of relativistic hydrodynamics as an essential part of the phenomenological description of heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC has motivated a significant body of theoretical work concerning its fundamental aspects. Our review presents these developments from the perspective of the underlying microscopic physics, using the language of quantum field theory, relativistic kinetic theory, and holography. We discuss the gradient expansion, the phenomenon of hydrodynamization, as well as several models of hydrodynamic evolution equations, highlighting the interplay between collective long-lived and transient modes in relativistic matter. Our aim to provide a unified presentation of this vast subject—which is naturally expressed in diverse mathematical languages—has also led us to include several new results on the large-order behaviour of the hydrodynamic gradient expansion.

Using the conservation laws for charge, energy, momentum, and angular momentum, we derive hydrodynamic equations for the charge density, local temperature, and fluid velocity, as well as for the polarization tensor, starting from local equilibrium distribution functions for particles and antiparticles with spin $1/2$. The resulting set of differential equations extends the standard picture of perfect-fluid hydrodynamics with a conserved entropy current in a minimal way. This framework can be used in space-time analyses of the evolution of spin and polarization in various physical systems including high-energy nuclear collisions. We demonstrate that a stationary vortex, which exhibits vorticity-spin alignment, corresponds to a special solution of the spin-hydrodynamical equations.

We introduce a new framework of highly anisotropic hydrodynamics that includes dissipation effects. Dissipation is defined by the form of the entropy source that depends on the pressure anisotropy and vanishes for the isotropic fluid. With a simple ansatz for the entropy source obeying general physical requirements, we are led to a nonlinear equation describing the time evolution of the anisotropy in purely longitudinal boost-invariant systems. Matter that is initially highly anisotropic approaches naturally the regime of the perfect fluid. Thus, the resulting evolution agrees with the expectations about the behavior of matter produced at the early stages of relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The equilibration is identified with the processes of entropy production.

We exactly solve the one-dimensional boost-invariant Boltzmann equation in the relaxation time approximation for arbitrary shear viscosity. The results are compared with the predictions of viscous and anisotropic hydrodynamics. Studying different nonequilibrium cases and comparing the exact kinetic-theory results to the second-order viscous hydrodynamics results we find that recent formulations of second-order viscous hydrodynamics agree better with the exact solution than the standard Israel-Stewart approach. Additionally, we find that, given the appropriate connection between the kinetic and anisotropic hydrodynamics relaxation times, anisotropic hydrodynamics provides a very good approximation to the exact relaxation time approximation solution.