On bulk viscosity and moduli decay

Abstract

This pedagogically intended lecture, one of four under the header "Basics of thermal QCD", reviews an interesting relationship, originally pointed out by Bodeker, that exists between the bulk viscosity of Yang-Mills theory (of possible relevance to the hydrodynamics of heavy ion collision experiments) and the decay rate of scalar fields coupled very weakly to a heat bath (appearing in some particle physics inspired cosmological scenarios). This topic serves, furthermore, as a platform on which a number of generic thermal field theory concepts are illustrated. The other three lectures (on the QCD equation of state and the rates of elastic as well as inelastic processes experienced by heavy quarks) are recapitulated in brief encyclopedic form.

12 pages. To appear in the proceedings of New Frontiers in QCD, Kyoto, Japan, January 18 - March 19, 2010. v2: reference added, final version

References in corpus (8)

• Viscosity Information from Relativistic Nuclear Collisions: How Perfect is the Fluid Observed at RHIC?
• How Much do Heavy Quarks Thermalize in a Heavy Ion Collision?
• The role of sterile neutrinos in cosmology and astrophysics
• Erratum: Transverse momentum and centrality dependence of high-\pt\ non-photonic electron suppression in Au+Au collisions at \sqrtsNN\ = 200 GeV
• Quark mass thresholds in QCD thermodynamics
• Heavy Quark Diffusion with Relativistic Langevin Dynamics in the Quark-Gluon Fluid
• Bulk Viscosity driven clusterization of quark-gluon plasma and early freeze-out in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Potentially Large One-loop Corrections to WIMP Annihilation

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• Runaway potentials in warm inflation satisfying the swampland conjectures
• Next-to-leading order thermal spectral functions in the perturbative domain
• Increasing Temperature toward the Completion of Reheating
• Fate of $Z_2$ Symmetric Scalar Field
• Scalar Trapping and Saxion Cosmology
• Thermal Effects on Saxion in Supersymmetric Model with Peccei-Quinn Symmetry
• Axion Models with High Scale Inflation
• Inflationary Gravitational Waves and the Evolution of the Early Universe
• Lepto-axiogenesis in minimal SUSY KSVZ model
• Dark Matter Chaotic Inflation in Light of BICEP2
• Lepto-axiogenesis and the scale of supersymmetry
• Axiogenesis with a Heavy QCD Axion
• Curvaton Dynamics Revisited
• Acoustic Misalignment Mechanism for Axion Dark Matter
• Thermal Effects and Sudden Decay Approximation in the Curvaton Scenario
• R-Parity Violation Axiogenesis