Hydrodynamics, Renormalization Group, and Universality Classes Far from Equilibrium

Abstract

Universality is one of the central organising principles of modern physics, explaining why systems with vastly different microscopic constituents can exhibit identical large-scale behaviour. While the classification of equilibrium critical phenomena through hydrodynamics and the renormalization group (RG) is now well established, our understanding of universality far from equilibrium remains far less developed. In recent years, however, rapid progress - driven in large part by developments in active and living matter - has uncovered a growing range of genuinely nonequilibrium universality classes (UCs) with no equilibrium counterparts. In this review, we present a pedagogical and unified introduction to hydrodynamic and RG approaches to nonequilibrium many-body systems. We first show how hydrodynamic theories can be systematically constructed from symmetry and conservation laws alone. We then introduce perturbative dynamic RG methods and demonstrate how hydrodynamic theories are organised into distinct UCs according to their scaling behaviour. Building on these foundations, we review the diverse nonequilibrium UCs uncovered since 2015, while emphasizing the conceptual connections and unifying physical principles underlying their emergence. We conclude by discussing open theoretical and experimental challenges for the field.