Structure of hydrodynamic flows in expanding quark-gluon plasmas

We give a description of the various types of hydrodynamic flows which may appear in the expansion of a baryonless quark-gluon plasma undergoing a transition to normal hadronic matter. The stability of elementary solutions to hydrodynamic equations is discussed and general one-dimensional similarity waves are constructed. These are used as an input for a numerical method which allows the calculation of the three-dimensional expansion of the plasma. As an application, we present a study of the cylindrical expansion of a plasma formed in a head-on nucleus-nucleus collision using a family of equations of state leading to various types of flows.