Early-time attractors in heavy-ion collisions may discriminate weakly and strongly coupled scenarios.
The article explores how solutions of expanding systems in heavy-ion collisions become insensitive to their initial conditions. By studying different theories, researchers found that in some cases, all initial conditions approach a universal attractor solution early on, before hydrodynamization. In strongly coupled systems, the attractor is reached at the same time as hydrodynamization, showing a difference between weakly and strongly coupled scenarios in heavy-ion collisions.