Convective stability of hot matter in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions

The convective stability of strongly interacting matter undergoing hydrodynamic flow in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions is studied in both the quark-gluon plasma and hadron gas phases. We find that this stability depends on the form of the initial conditions assumed for the hydrodynamic flow. In the case of initial conditions corresponding to partial transparency the flow of the quark-gluon plasma is stable whereas the flow of the hadron gas is convectively unstable. The timescale for hydrodynamic oscillations around the (stable or unstable) equilibrium state is found to be larger than the expected lifetime of the system, suggesting that the flow in either case is close to neutral convective equilibrium.