Relativistic shocks in a Synge gas

The main conclusions of a detailed study of relativistic shocks in particle gases at high temperatures are presented. The initial wave pulse was taken to propagate into a uniform static medium, and the hydrodynamical equations were used to evolve the solution forward in time and to study shock formation and subsequent damping. It was found that the damping rate is initially an increasing function of the initial velocity amplitude of the wave, but reaches a maximum and then decreases again, tending toward zero in the limit. This confirmed that strong relativistic shocks do not damp as quickly as would be indicated by extrapolation of results from weak shock theory. Qualitatively similar behavior is found for both the Synge gas and the photon-dominated gas. The latter produces significantly more entropy than the Synge gas, and its profile is far more sharply peaked.