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Diffusion processes involving multiple conserved charges: a first study from kinetic theory and implications to the fluid-dynamical modeling of heavy ion collisions

The bulk nuclear matter produced in heavy ion collisions carries a multitude of conserved quantum numbers: electric charge, baryon number, and strangeness. Therefore, the diffusion processes associated to these conserved charges cannot occur independently and must be described in terms of a set of coupled diffusion equations. This physics is implemented by replacing the traditional diffusion coefficients for each conserved charge by a diffusion coefficient matrix, which quantifies the coupling between the conserved quantum numbers. The diagonal coefficients of this matrix are the usual charge diffusion coefficients, while the off-diagonal entries describe the diffusive coupling of the charge currents. In this paper, we show how to calculate this diffusion coefficient matrix from kinetic theory and provide results for a hadron resonance gas and a gas of partons. We further find that the off-diagonal entries can reach similar magnitudes compared to the diagonal entries. In order to provide some insight on the influence that the coupling between the net charge diffusion currents can have on heavy ion observables, we present first results for the diffusive evolution of a hadronic system in a simple (1+1)D-fluid dynamics approach, and study different configurations of the diffusion matrix.