Extended applicability domain of viscous anisotropic hydrodynamics in (2+1)-D Bjorken flow with transverse expansion

Abstract: We perform (2{+}1)-D simulations of viscous anisotropic hydrodynamics (VAH) under boost-invariant and conformal conditions. Comparing both VAH and traditional viscous hydrodynamics with kinetic theory in the relaxation-time approximation as the underlying microscopic theory, we show that VAH provides a superior description of the evolution across a wide range of opacity, effectively extending the boundaries of the applicability of hydrodynamic modeling. Our results demonstrate VAH's potential for describing collective flow in small systems where traditional hydrodynamics faces challenges.