Suppression of elliptic flow in a minimally viscous quark-gluon plasma
Nuclear Theory
2008-11-26 v2
Abstract
We compute the time evolution of elliptic flow in non-central relativistic heavy-ion collisions, using a (2+1)-dimensional code with longitudinal boost-invariance to simulate viscous fluid dynamics in the causal Israel-Stewart formulation. We show that even ``minimal'' shear viscosity eta/s=hbar/(4pi) leads to a large reduction of elliptic flow compared to ideal fluid dynamics, raising questions about the interpretation of recent experimental data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0709.0742,
title = {Suppression of elliptic flow in a minimally viscous quark-gluon plasma},
author = {Huichao Song and Ulrich W. Heinz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0709.0742},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
5 pages, incl. 4 figures. Fig.2 redrawn, several footnotes and references added. This version accepted by Physics Letters B