Causality is violated in the early stages of state-of-the-art heavy-ion hydrodynamic simulations. Such violations are present in up to 75% of the fluid cells in the initial time and only after 2–3 fm/$c$ of evolution do we find that $50\%$ of the fluid cells are definitely causal. Superluminal propagation reaches up to 15% the speed of light in some of the fluid cells. The inclusion of pre-equilibrium evolution significantly reduces the number of acausal cells. Our findings suggests that relativistic causality may place constraints on the available parameter space of heavy-ion collision simulations when factored into more thorough statistical analyses.

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• Relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Spacetime topology & causal structure
• Relativistic hydrodynamics