Dissipative relativistic fluid dynamics: a new way to derive the equations of motion from kinetic theory

Abstract: We re-derive the equations of motion of dissipative relativistic fluid dynamics from kinetic theory. In contrast to the derivation of Israel and Stewart, which considered the second moment of the Boltzmann equation to obtain equations of motion for the dissipative currents, we directly use the latter's definition. Although the equations of motion obtained via the two approaches are formally identical, the coefficients are different. We show that, for the one-dimensional scaling expansion, our method is in better agreement with the solution obtained from the Boltzmann equation.