Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement No. 168, 2007 347 Relativistic Hydrodynamics at RHIC and LHC

Recent development of a hydrodynamic model is discussed by putting an emphasis on realistic treatment of the early and late stages in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The model, which incorporates a hydrodynamic description of the quark-gluon plasma with a kinetic approach of hadron cascades, is applied to analysis of elliptic flow data at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider energy. It is predicted that the elliptic flow parameter based on the hybrid model increases with the collision energy up to the Large Hadron Collider energy. One of the important discoveries made at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory is that the elliptic flow parameter,1) namely, the second Fourier coefficient v2 = 〈cos(2φ) 〉 of the azimuthal momentum distribution dN/dφ,2) is quite large in non-central Au+Au collisions.3) Over th