Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

A new method for solving relativistic ideal hydrodynamics in (1+3)D is developed. Longitudinal and transverse radial flows are explicitly embedded into the ansatz for the velocity field and the hydrodynamic equations are reduced to a single equation for the transverse velocity field only, which is analytically more tractable as compared to the full hydrodynamic equations. As an application we use the method to find analytically all possible solutions whose transverse velocity fields have power dependence on the proper time and transverse radius. The possible applications to relativistic heavy ion collisions and possible generalizations of the method are discussed. © 2009 The American Physical Society.