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.

We present results of the application of the anisotropic hydrodynamics (aHydro) framework to (2+1)-dimensional boost-invariant systems. The necessary aHydro dynamical equations are derived by taking moments of the Boltzmann equation using a momentum-space anisotropic one-particle distribution function. We present a derivation of the necessary equations and then proceed to numerical solutions of the resulting partial differential equations using both realistic smooth Glauber initial conditions and fluctuating Monte Carlo Glauber initial conditions. For this purpose we have developed two numerical implementations: one that is based on straightforward integration of the resulting partial differential equations supplemented by a two-dimensional weighted Lax-Friedrichs smoothing in the case of fluctuating initial conditions and another that is based on the application of the Kurganov-Tadmor central scheme. For our final results we compute the collective flow of the matter via the laboratory-frame energy-momentum tensor eccentricity as a function of the assumed shear viscosity-to-entropy ratio, proper time, and impact parameter.

Recently advocated expressions for the phase-space dependent spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ density matrices of particles and antiparticles are analyzed in detail and reduced to forms linear in the Dirac spin operator. This allows for a natural determination of the spin-polarization vectors of particles and antiparticles by evaluating the trace of products of the spin density matrices and the Pauli matrices. We demonstrate that the total spin-polarization vector obtained in this way agrees with the Pauli-Lubański four-vector, constructed from an appropriately chosen spin tensor and boosted to the particle rest frame. We further show that several forms of the spin tensor used in the literature yield the same Pauli-Lubański four-vector.