English

Shear Viscosity in a Perturbative Quark-Gluon-Plasma

Nuclear Theory 2010-12-09 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Among the key features of hot and dense QCD matter produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at RHIC is its very low shear viscosity, indicative of the properties of a near-ideal fluid, and a large opacity demonstrated by jet energy loss measurements. In this work, we utilize a microscopic transport model based on the Boltzmann equation with quark and gluon degrees of freedom and cross sections calculated from perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics to simulate an ideal Quark-Gluon-Plasma in full thermal and chemical equilibrium. We then use the Kubo formalism to calculate the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio of the medium as a function of temperature and system composition. One of our key results is that the shear viscosity over entropy-density ratio η/s\eta/s becomes invariant to the chemical composition of the system when plotted as a function of energy-density instead of temperature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1008.2306,
  title  = {Shear Viscosity in a Perturbative Quark-Gluon-Plasma},
  author = {John Fuini and Nasser S. Demir and Dinesh K. Srivastava and Steffen A. Bass},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1008.2306},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

11 pages, 8 figures: version #2 contains some revisions and added references to clarify relationship to previously published work

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:00:26.952Z