English

Anomalous Viscosity of an Expanding Quark-Gluon Plasma

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2008-11-26 v2 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We argue that an expanding quark-gluon plasma has an anomalous viscosity, which arises from interactions with dynamically generated color fields. We derive an expression for the anomalous viscosity in the turbulent plasma domain and apply it to the hydrodynamic expansion phase, when the quark-gluon plasma is near equilibrium. The anomalous viscosity dominates over the collisional viscosity for weak coupling and not too late times. This effect may provide an explanation for the apparent ``nearly perfect'' liquidity of the matter produced in nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider without the assumption that it is a strongly coupled state.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0603092,
  title  = {Anomalous Viscosity of an Expanding Quark-Gluon Plasma},
  author = {M. Asakawa and S. A. Bass and B. Müller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0603092},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

Final version accepted for publication