Subluminality and damping of plane waves in causal dissipative relativistic fluid dynamics

In this paper and its companion [2], the authors introduce a causal hyperbolic modification of the Eckart-Landau-Weinberg dissipation tensor, for the dynamics of collision-dominated radiation. The resulting system of partial differential equations for relativistic fluid dynamics is shown to exclusively admit subluminal, decaying modes for any finite wavelength. This validates the new relativistic Navier-Stokes-Fourier type theory as both causal and dissipative. Department of Mathematics, University of Konstanz, Konstanz Germany; Supported by DFG through its Excellence Grant to University of Konstanz. Department of Mathematics, University of California, Davis, Davis CA, USA 95616; Supported by NSF Applied Mathematics Grant Number DMS-070-7532.