Shear Viscosity in a Perturbative Quark-Gluon-Plasma

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 $\eta /s$ becomes invariant to the chemical composition of the system when plotted as a function of energy-density instead of temperature.

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

References in corpus (9)

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